


Hope

by movetotherhythm



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dark/Upsetting Themes, Gay Sex, Homophobic Language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1892676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/movetotherhythm/pseuds/movetotherhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isaac Lahey struggles with his past. He struggles to remember his mother and brother, and he struggles to dispel the memory of his father. He's tried to move on for years, but he can't. He's 23 now and he's trying to focus on his future with Scott. But one day, a little girl walks into his life and strikes a chord with Isaac. He decides that he must save her from her future - and his past. By any means necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There will be no graphic depictions of child abuse or sexual abuse at any point in this fic. However, the general themes are upsetting and there will be mentions of those themes that may be fairly blunt and to the point. Because of this, I would advise you to avoid this fic if either of these themes may be a trigger to you. However, if you choose to read this, please note that everything in this fic is entirely fictitious and (thankfully) bears no intentional resemblance to the lives of anybody I know. 
> 
> If you read this, I hope you're here for the long run. A massive shoutout to my beta, @hellokhaleesi. Thank you for all of your assistance with this chapter and all the help I'll need in the coming chapters. 
> 
> Depending on reception of this fic, there may be a sequel. I've planned it and I know what will happen, I'll ask whether people want to read it later on when plot becomes clearer.
> 
> All that's left to say is that I'd love to hear feedback and general comments/kudos are loved and appreciated. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy!

Isaac had been with Scott for almost three years when they had their first big argument. Isaac was shaking with anger, and Scott didn’t even understand why. Isaac knew that he was overreacting, but also that he was reasonable in his fury. Scott had disappeared for three days. When he returned, he told Isaac that he had gone on a trip with Kira; his _beautiful, funny ex-girlfriend_ Kira _._ Admittedly, Isaac and Kira were friends and he knew that she would never hurt him like that even if Scott would, but he couldn’t help but worry.

When Isaac had clearly questioned Scott’s fidelity, Scott raged too. Isaac didn’t genuinely believe that Scott would cheat on him - he knew of Scott’s incredible sense of loyalty far too well to think such a thing - but the fact that he knew nothing about his boyfriend’s little trip was enough to spark his engrained paranoia.

It was lucky that Melissa finished work at the time she did, and entered the house at the time she did, and stood between the two young men at the time she did, or she probably would have ended up on fucking Jerry Springer under the caption “I watched my son and his fiancé kill each other with a cheese grater”.

Well, probably not. Isaac and Scott did love each other. But, Isaac was working full time now, and Scott was into his last year of veterinarian training, and they were both stressed. So an argument that could have been sorted by reassurances and disbelieving head shakes ballooned into something huge, and Isaac stormed out of the house.

-

The kids’ park on JFK Avenue covered an area of about a square mile, with a gigantic climbing frame that dominated the skyline. It stood as tall as most of the trees that lined the back boundary of the park. There was a red stain on the tarmac a little way away from the base of the frame that anybody under the age of fourteen in Beacon Hills believed was a blood stain from a kid who fell off and died. Isaac, having been nearly ten when the park was first improved, knew that a builder had spilled his drink in with the tarmac mix and it had set that colour.

Isaac sat on the bench he usually chose; under the shade of the tree, close enough to see the children playing on the climbing frame but not so close that he couldn’t see the road a few hundred metres behind it.

He knew that Scott would look here if he wanted to look at all. They knew each other as well as two people could.

-

_Isaac and Scott had met at school. They both played lacrosse, Scott was co-captain and Isaac had just managed to achieve first-string, so there was a fairly noticeable difference in their abilities. But Scott saw Isaac sitting alone outside the school’s front entrance one day and, being the incredible person that he is, initiated a little passing game between them and gave him a few bits of advice on how to play better._

_After that, they had become good friends. Isaac would spend half of his time with Erica and Boyd, and when he wasn’t with them, he was with Scott. When Erica moved to Vancouver with her mom after her parents split, Boyd went with her. And Isaac became entirely involved with Scott’s ‘pack’._

_Lydia was the person he spent most time with to begin with. He was scruffy, badly dressed and had zero confidence. She was the top of the social pyramid, had a keen fashion sense, and most importantly, she loved shopping. Isaac became almost a project for her, and within two weeks, they’d gone through half of the money that he had saved from his graveyard job. Lydia had even donated about $300 to the cause when Isaac used up the $200 that he had on him one day._

_Isaac felt bad about taking her money but she insisted. Later on that day, as Lydia drove him home, she told him that after Jackson had moved to London, she needed distractions on a daily basis. She then told him that_ he _was a distraction that she loved spending time with and she was glad that Scott had introduced them. Just before Isaac left the car, Lydia stopped him._

_“You can talk to me about anything, anytime,” she said, taking his cell phone from his hand, and entering her number. She kissed him on the cheek and reminded him of the clothing schedule she had picked out for him that covered a school week. He smiled and waved until she left._

_In his entire life, Isaac had only ever had about three friends. There was Matt, who had stopped talking to him one day after coming to his house and Isaac had never known why. There were Erica and Boyd, who moved to Vancouver._

_But now he had Scott, and he had Lydia. And he couldn’t help but smile._

-

Isaac smiled like he had in the memory, his fingers playing absently with the fabric of the long sleeved top - another of Lydia's star choices, he realised not bothering to try and suppress his grin. It was good to think of the time when his life had changed for the better. His anger had already begun to dwindle.

He took out his cell phone and pulled up Scott’s number, but he decided that he didn’t want to look too desperate, and he wanted to see if Scott would call first. So, he put his phone back and looked up at the climbing frame.

It was therapeutic to him, watching the children play. He realized that this would sound completely perverted to most people, but Isaac knew he had good reason. He liked watching the children playing because he liked to remember that most kids are happy, that most kids don’t have to go through what he did. He liked to watch smiling faces, pushing and pulling each other, laughing all the time, because it was a part of childhood that he never really got to have.

Watching the children made him remember the time when his mother was alive, when they would bake brownies and go to the cinema and get ice cream at the park from the kiosk. When Camden was just a teenager and resented anything to do with public displays of affection with anyone but would play soccer with Isaac in the park and let him fall asleep curled into his side when they lay down under the sun. When Isaac’s father hadn’t yet became a violent, abusive alcoholic.

But it was more than that. Isaac yearned for normality, and the kids symbolized that for him. They were the three bedroom house with a white picket fence, Sunday dinners while listening to the radio. As well as his past, Isaac thought of his future when he was at the park; the future that he could see himself having with Scott.

And so, when Isaac and Scott argued, Isaac felt he needed something that cheered him up, and the playground was the first place that came to mind. That’s how he ended up sitting on the bench when a pair of known bullies made a little girl their target.

Normally, if Isaac had seen two ten year old boys picking on a young girl, he would have approached calmly told them to stop, and tell the boys’ parents so that they could deal with it. However, since Isaac was still relatively angry, ‘calmly’ would not be the appropriate word to describe how he dealt with the situation.

“Listen here you little cunts,” Isaac said on the approach, not raising his voice but clearly delivering the message that the two boys had better stop or they would end up a lot worse off than this little girl. “I’m gonna count to three, and if you’re not running away by the time I finish, I will personally make sure you won’t be running anywhere, anytime soon.”

The taller of the two boys looked like he was going to square up to Isaac, until the smaller one grabbed his arm and they both ran off. Isaac turned to the little girl.

“Hiya sweetie, my name’s Isaac,” he said, willing his tone to hide how angry he felt. “Are you hurt?”

The girl shook her head. She was sitting on the ground having been pushed over but Isaac could see her knees and elbows were free of scratches.

“Do you know who those boys are?” Isaac asked. “If you do, tell me and I’ll tell their parents so they don’t bother you again.”

The girl shook her head again. It didn’t matter that much because Isaac knew that one of them lived on the same street as he and Scott, so he could drop by the house on his way home.

“Is your mummy or daddy here?” Isaac asked, wondering if the girl was going to communicate solely by twitches.

The girl nodded, seemingly confirming his wonderings, but then she spoke.

“I don’t have a mummy but my daddy is at the shop.”

Isaac frowned. Although the shop was only a minute’s walk away from the park, her father definitely didn’t qualify as being ‘here’. He couldn’t help but think that the girl’s dad was irresponsible to the point of neglectful leaving his young daughter alone in the park, even for a second.

“Do you have anybody here that you know?” Isaac asked. “Like, a babysitter or a brother or sister?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have a babysitter or a brother or a sister. It’s just me and daddy, but he’s at the shop.”

Isaac frowned again. How could someone leave their child unattended? Even only to nip to the shop?

“Do you want to stay here with me until your daddy gets back and then we can tell him what happened?” he asked.

“Well, daddy says I shouldn’t talk to strangers when nobody’s around and you’re a stranger,” she said, awkwardly staring at her feet, twisting her hands.

 _Well, at least he’s taught her the fucking basics_ , Isaac thought.

“Okay, that’s fair enough,” he said. “How about you go and play on the climbing frame again, and then come and tell me when you see your daddy and we’ll go and tell him what’s happened. Deal?”

The girl nodded and ran off, her curly golden hair bouncing on her shoulders.

Isaac couldn’t shake the intense dislike for the girl’s father that was beginning to manifest itself in him. This wasn’t healthy for him, Isaac knew; fathers who don’t seem to care enough about their kids was a topic far too close to home for him.

As the little girl resumed her playing, Isaac resumed his reminiscing.

-

_Initially, Isaac didn’t think that he and Stiles would ever get on. Stiles was a hyperactive, over the top, centre of attention sort of guy, whereas he was somewhat sullen, calm and liked to blend into the background._

_They’d spoken before; how could they not? They were both on the lacrosse team and were both good friends with Scott and Lydia. But, they’d never really clicked._

_But one day, Isaac had been reading the local paper and had seen a small congratulations message to Joseph Lahey and Mary Faulkner on their marriage. By this time, Isaac had left his father’s house and had been living with Scott for almost a year._

_After lacrosse practise, he’d stayed in the changing rooms and cried, and it was Stiles who’d found him._

_“What’s wrong?” Stiles had asked._

_“My dad got remarried,” was Isaac’s reply._

_Stiles knew about Isaac’s history of abuse, and he looked a little confused._

_“Isn’t that a good thing?” he asked. “Like, he’s moving on so he’s not focusing on you anymore. Doesn’t this mean you’re free of him?”_

_Isaac nodded. It was his exact thoughts that Stiles had relayed but that wasn’t what was bothering him._

_“It’s my mom,” he told Stiles. “my brother’s dead, her parents are dead, she had no brothers or sisters or any close family. I just feel like now that dad has remarried, I’m the only person who remembers her, or even cares about her._

_Stiles had looked very awkward at the topic of conversation but he sat down next to Isaac and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Isaac didn’t even flinch away from the contact._

_“I see what you mean,” Stiles said, his voice uncharacteristically slow and steady. “It’s hard remembering someone who’s gone when there’s nobody to share the memories with. Neither of my parents have siblings so when my mom died, it was just me and dad who seemed to care.”_

_Isaac raised his tearstained eyes to meet Stiles’ surprisingly also wet ones. Stiles smiled a little._

_“You know, when my mom died, dad and me planted a flower each for her in the garden. When my grandpa died, we did it again for him. When Scott’s uncle died, he and Melissa both came over and planted a flower. We’ve got enough to fill a florist now, but I’m sure there’s room for one more, if you think it might help.”_

_Isaac’s heart swelled because Stiles was showing him kindness and – more importantly – understanding._

_So they had walked down to the garden store on the town’s main street and bought two forget-me-not seeds. Stiles didn’t question the extra one; he knew all about Camden._

_Isaac planted them next to Stiles’s flower for Claudia. Surprisingly, he felt a lot better._

_“The idea is that if different people have different flowers, everybody learns who the flowers represent,” Stiles said. “then, even if we had to add a flower for somebody who planted one before, nobody would be forgotten because we can all remember together.”_

_“Thank you.” Isaac said. It’s all he could say. It’s all that he needed to say. Stiles put an arm around him and they walked inside to where the Sheriff looked on smiling sadly._

_Isaac had eaten dinner with them that night. It felt good to know that other people would help him remember his mother and brother. It also felt good to know he had another friend._

-

“Isaac!”

The little girl’s shout broke him free of his reverie. He looked up to see her standing in front of him, smiling.

“My daddy’s back. Do you still want to speak to him?”

Isaac nodded and stood up. He couldn’t see anybody new, but judging by the route the girl was taking, her father was on the opposite side of the climbing frame and therefore out of view.

He didn’t really know what he would say. He wanted to tell the man that his daughter had been faced with bullies and had been brave and stood up to them, but he also wanted to tell the guy to get his fucking act together so a random stranger wouldn’t have to step in on his behalf.

When Isaac saw the man that the girl was pointing to, he froze. The man did likewise.

Because standing there with a cigarette between his lips, looking straight back at him was Joseph Lahey.

And suddenly, Isaac didn’t want to talk to the girl’s father. Because the girl’s father was his father. And he did not want to talk to his father. He wanted to run. But he couldn’t. His feet felt like they were glued to the ground, as his father’s had regained their ability to move. The man that Isaac most hated in the world moved towards him.

“What’s your name?” Isaac said to the girl, looking down at her and hoping beyond hope that his eyes didn’t betray the intense wave of fear and nausea that had flooded his body at the sight of Joseph. Luckily, the girl seemed none the wiser.

“Hope.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chance meeting with his father shows Isaac that the past can't ever really be forgotten - and moving on is more difficult than he ever thought. But he knows that the future is more important than the past, and his past could well be shaping up to be a little girl's future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again a massive thank you to my beta @hellokhaleesi! 
> 
> I'm going to reiterate the fact that abuse (physical and, specifically, sexual) are both prominent themes in this story. Please, if these could be triggers for you, don't risk it.

_Malia was an odd one. She was fierce, quick to anger, and loved to fight. But, she was stubbornly loyal and Isaac admired her. However, despite being friends with Lydia and Scott's at-the-time girlfriend, Kira, she never crossed Isaac's path until after graduation._

_It was the night that Isaac, Scott, Stiles and Lydia had gone to a nightclub. None of them were 21, but this place was notoriously lax on ID regulation and the four of them were admitted without any trouble. They met Malia and Kira in there. Isaac had drunk alcohol before but he’d never actively done it with the intention of ending up intoxicated. Naturally, the night was a blur in his memory._

_There was one point that stuck in his memory though – Malia kicked ass. Isaac’s confidence had sky rocketed after a few vodkas and long-story-short, he came onto a straight guy with a deep set prejudice against gays. The guy threw a punch along with a “you fucking fag” and followed it with “you cunts should be fucking hanged”. And then Malia was on him._

_She broke his jawbone in one place and his cheekbone in two, and that’s not even taking into consideration the three teeth he lost. All that and he didn’t press charges. There was a rumour that spread around town that Malia had threatened to kill him to scare him into silence, but Isaac knew better; her ferocious glare was more than sufficient._

_She became quite protective of him after that, and it was Malia that stood with Isaac on his 20 th birthday when he went back to his father’s house for the first time since leaving. They’d departed with the money that Isaac’s mother had left him, and even Joseph Lahey was left intimidated by Malia Tate._

-

“Hello Isaac,” Joseph said, almost pleasantly. “What brings you here today?”

Isaac felt like someone was punching the inside of his throat. He could barely steady his breathing, let alone talk. Hope had started to bounce on the balls of her feet; clearly, she was excited by the fact that her father and Isaac knew each other. This was a sentiment not shared by her half-brother.

“Aren’t you going to talk?” Joseph asked politely. He almost sounded concerned, as if Isaac’s silence was something deeply worrying. “It’s been a long time since we last spoke. How old are you now? 25?”

“23,” Isaac said blankly. He thought that if he said any more then vomit would accompany his words out of his mouth.

“You’re looking well,” Joseph said. And he reached out and patted Isaac on the arm. Isaac recoiled and averted his eyes..

“Don’t touch me,” he hissed.

Hope grabbed her father’s hand excitedly.

“Daddy, how do you know Isaac, daddy?” she asked.

“Do you remember when I told you that daddy had another lady friend before mummy?” Joseph asked her in a sickeningly loving voice that Isaac could not for a second believe was sincere. “Well, that lady was Isaac’s mummy. So Isaac is your brother.”

Isaac’s throat tightened and he felt like he was suffocating. He grabbed at his collar and pulled it, hoping the cool air on his body would calm him down.

“Brother, brother, brother!” Hope shouted and left her – their – father’s side and wrapped her arms around Isaac’s legs. He patted her head awkwardly and another wave of nausea swept over him. He couldn’t help but notice a bruise on her arm that was clearly in the shape of a hand print.

“Are you-?” Isaac almost began to ask his father but he stopped himself. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge his past with his father in front of the man in question, and there was certainly no way in hell that he could outright ask if he was abusing his daughter. But Joseph seemed to have learned to read minds as well as act the loving father.

And that’s when the last tiny grain of hope left Isaac.

Joseph looked at him and smiled – not a smile that radiated warmth and affection, but a smile that he had often worn as he locked Isaac in the basement freezer, or thrown a plate or ornament his way, or one of the times when he had stumbled into Isaac’s room at night and unzipped his trousers and –

Isaac banished the thought. He couldn’t think of any of that now. Abuse was his past but he knew all too well that it could be his sister’s present and future.

“Can Isaac come back for dinner tonight please daddy? Pleasepleaseplease?”

Joseph broke the eye contact with his son, ignoring the chill that visibly affected Isaac, and looked down at Hope.

“Not tonight, honey, you know I don’t do the shopping until the weekend,” he said. He then turned to Isaac. “however, you’d be more than welcome to join us for dinner on Sunday, Isaac.”

Isaac’s chest tightened in the same way his throat had. For one absurd moment, he thought he was having a heart attack. Before he replied, his father spoke again.

“I suppose it could be a little awkward, just the three of us,” he said, in what _must_ have been mock sincerity. Isaac couldn’t tell whether his father was taking the piss. “You’d be welcome to bring a friend. How about that lovely young man that you live with? Scott, is his name?”

“Scott?” Hope asked, looking up at her newfound brother. “Is Scott my brother too?”

Despite the fear in his heart, and the sadness that accompanied it, Isaac smiled. His sister was adorable. She didn’t know that anything was amiss in the slightest and Isaac could not bear to be the person that broke her blissful ignorance.

He nodded.

“He will be one day,” Isaac said. “I’m going to marry him.”

“You’re going to marry a boy?” Hope asked. She sounded delighted and confused all at once. “But who will wear the dress?”

Isaac laughed until his father’s chuckle joined his, and the laughter died in his throat.

“Neither of us,” he said. “We’ll both wear suits.”

Hope looked disappointed. Apparently she really liked dresses. Isaac couldn’t help but think about how lovely this little girl was. She was clearly going to be pretty, and she was quick to laugh and totally adorable. She was easy to love. He wanted to believe that she could have changed his father, that the abuse heaped on Isaac was just stress-induced and exacerbated by alcohol dependency and PTSD. The guy had lost his wife and son in the space of a few years after all.

But Isaac knew that wasn’t the case. He could have fooled himself, could have believed that Hope was completely safe with his born again father, perhaps even that their own relationship could be rebuilt. But that _smile_ told him otherwise. He knew that smile; it had haunted him every night for years.

“So what do you say Isaac?” Joseph asked, motioning for Hope to come back to him. Obediently, she did so after squeezing Isaac’s leg – and he realized that she had been hugging him for almost two full minutes. “Dinner on Sunday? You, Scott, Hope and I?”

Isaac moved to refuse but his sister looked at him so expectantly – so happily. He couldn’t refuse. He gathered all of the courage that he had in his entire being and looked his father in the eye.

“I’ll speak to Scott,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

It was the first full sentence that he’d said to his father without a bowed head in over ten years.

Joseph cracked his hands together. “We live at 144 McKinley Avenue. But we must be going now, Hope.”

“See you Sunday!” Hope shouted, waving her hand frantically at Isaac who only stood about four feet away from her.

“Yeah.” Isaac forced a smile. “See you on Sunday.”

He waited for Hope to stop looking back and waving at him before he pulled his phone out of his pocket.

He held the number 2 on his keypad in until “Calling… … Scott” appeared on the screen and he lifted it to his ear to listen to the rings.

 _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,_ Isaac thought.

-

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Scott said, after Isaac had finished talking. “But this is a bad plan. And I know bad plans.”

“I have to agree with him,” Stiles piped up. “And I know bad plans. I make bad plans.”

Stiles had gone round to cheer Scott up after the big argument. The two of them were watching a movie when Scott’s phone went off. After a short discussion which mainly involved Isaac telling Scott to “shut up and listen” a lot with the occasional “I’ll say sorry later”, they were on their way to meet him.

About twenty minutes later, the three of them ended up sitting around a semi-circular table in the café that Malia worked in, talking about a possible dinner date with Isaac’s father.

“Isaac,” Scott said, one hand holding his coffee and the other holding his fiancé’s free hand. “I don’t think I could do that. He – well, you know – he – what he did was – I just think maybe – well – he’s a cunt and I’ll kill him.”

Isaac sighed. He knew exactly why Scott was cautious (or perhaps homicidally furious) – why he himself was also cautious – but he couldn’t quite put into words why he felt like he needed to do this.

“I have a sister, Scott,” he said eventually. “My little sister, she’s like three or four, and I can’t let her go through what I went through. You know what she said to me?”

Scott looked sad but he made no attempt to interrupt.

“She said,” Isaac continued, “’I don’t have a mummy’. That’s what set my dad off with me. If he was already fucking abusive going into this marriage then Hope’s mom might have been the only thing stopping him from hurting her. Now she’s gone.”

Scott looked pained, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. After a moment of hesitation, he picked his mug up and downed the last of his coffee.

“Hey Stiles,” he said, “take my card and get us both another drink.” He turned to Isaac. “You want anything, I?” Isaac shook his head and Scott handed his card over to Stiles, who seemed more than happy to stand up – ADHD coupled with caffeine can make anyone a little restless.

As soon as Stiles was out of earshot, Scott turned back to give Isaac his full attention. He had an odd look on his face; something between pity and fury.

“Do you think he’s, you know,” Scott said anxiously. “Doing what he did to you? Not the hitting, the other thing.”

“You mean raping her?” Isaac replied bluntly, making Scott flinch. When his fiancé nodded hesitantly, he continued. “I don’t know. I mean it’s a possibility, obviously. I’d like to think he would never do anything like that to a kid – or anyone really – but we both know that isn’t true.”

Scott looked sad, more so than Isaac had seen him in a long time. All of Isaac’s close friends knew of the abuse that he’d faced as a child. Isaac wasn’t ashamed of what happened because he knew that it wasn’t his fault. But the sexual side of the abuse that he’d faced was a different story. When he thought about it, it made him feel weak and dirty. He knew that he hadn’t deserved what his father had done and that it was nobody’s fault but Joseph’s, but that didn’t mean he felt comfortable talking about it. Only Scott knew the extent of the abuse. Melissa knew too; she had been the nurse that had taken care of Isaac when he came into hospital one time. She was the only adult he’d trusted.

They sat in silence. Isaac was thinking about his father; the love that had turned into hatred and the years of abuse and torment and neglect. He assumed Scott was thinking the situation through in his head.

Isaac had explained everything to Scott, minus one detail. But that was for a later conversation. There was no point talking about that when there was still a possibility that Hope was perfectly safe with Joseph, however slim the possibility may have been.

“Okay,” Scott said at last. “I’ll go with you. But we can leave at any time, just say the word. And if he so much as tries to lay a finger on you and it even _could_ be in a threatening way, I’m going to fucking hurt him.”

Isaac smiled and leant over to kiss him, almost knocking the coffee out of the newly-returned Stiles’s hands.

“Twat,” Stiles groaned as a scalding droplet of coffee landed on the skin between his index finger and thumb.

Isaac smiled despite the feeling inside him. He was going to spend time with his father. He was terrified.

“Finish these and then we’ll go home,” Scott said. “We need to finish the provisional guest list for the wedding.”

Isaac smiled.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isaac and Scott prepare for dinner with Joseph and Hope - and Melissa makes an alarming discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait for this chapter, the past fortnight has been hectic. Two grandparents and an uncle in hospital, plus I got my exam results so it's been quite stressful. Thankfully my results weren't too bad and my grandparents and uncle are all on the road to recovery. 
> 
> Explicit mentions of sexual abuse in this chapter. Please avoid if you will find this triggering. 
> 
> I'm going to try and get a few chapters ahead of publishing this week so I don't end up falling behind again. I want to ideally get this finished by the new year. Thanks so much for reading and remember, comments and kudos are sunshine! 
> 
> (NB. I beta'd this chapter myself as my friend @hellokhaleesi has been unavailable to do so, so there is much higher chance of there being little grammatical/continuation errors in this chapter than the previous two. If you find one, it would mean a lot if you could privately message me and let me know so I can rectify any mistakes.)
> 
> Once again, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy.

“I can’t stop you from making your own decisions,” said Melissa. “But I don’t like this one little bit.”

Isaac grimaced. He completely understood Melissa’s reluctance to let him and Scott go to dinner at Joseph’s house. He could see that she was struggling to understand why he would even want to sit down and eat with a man that abused him for years. If he was being completely honest with himself, Isaac was struggling to understand his own reasoning. 

“Mom,” Scott interjected before Isaac had the chance to try and explain. “I know you don’t get it, but Isaac wants to do this. I’m going to be with him the whole time; I won’t leave them alone together.” 

He broke off, looking to Isaac for permission to tell his mother the main reason for their seemingly insane plan. Isaac nodded and looked down at his half empty plate, his appetite no stronger than it had been for the past two days. Scott turned back to his mother.

“Isaac’s dad has a daughter,” he said, using his eyes to silently beg his mother to understand the implications without having to ask. Fortunately, Melissa McCall was rather clever. 

“Oh, honey,” she said as she reached over to grasp Isaac’s hand. “I get it, I get it. Okay, I won’t try to dissuade you from going but be careful. What’s her name?” 

“Hope,” Isaac said. 

“Hope Lahey? Or does she have a different surname?” 

“I honestly don’t know, Melissa. Her mother’s name was Faulkner. If it’s not Lahey, it’ll be that, or a combination.”

“Okay,” Melissa said. She stood up from the dining table and walked over to the telephone. “Okay, let’s see.”

“What are you doing?” Isaac asked. 

“I’m going to phone the hospital and see if I can get her records,” she said. “Any suspicious injuries she’s ever suffered, I’ll know about them within the next fifteen minutes.”

“Are you allowed to do that? Just demand people’s medical records?” Scott asked incredulously. 

“No,” she said. “But a lot of people owe me a lot of favours. It’s just a case of knowing which one to call in.” 

-

“Isaac,” Melissa shouted up the stairs. “Can you come down here for a minute, honey?” 

Isaac exchanged a look with Scott and could tell that they were both thinking the same thing. Melissa must have found something out about Hope. They could tell by the tone of her voice; collected, but noticeably controlled. The two of them stood up from the edge of their bed and made for the door, before Melissa’s voice came up the stairs once again.

“Alone.” 

The two of them exchanged another look, an eyebrow raised each. Scott shrugged and sat back down on the bed as Isaac made for the door.

“What’s up?” he asked on entering the kitchen. 

Melissa looked worried – like really worried. She gestured for Isaac to sit down and when he did so, she looked at him for a good minute, fidgeting all the while, before she spoke. 

“Two suspicious injuries, one possibly suspicious,” she said. Isaac noticed that she was chewing the inside of her lip. He’d picked up on that a few times. It was a tick she suffered from when she was anxious about something.

Isaac kept quiet, waiting for her to go on. This is what he had wanted. To know If his suspicions were correct or not, but now that he was just about to find out, he felt faint and nauseated. He willed himself to listen.

“Two years ago, she was brought into hospital after suffering second-degree burns to the index and middle finger of her left hand. She told the doctor that she had burnt it on the ‘hot bit of the oven’. After asking her parents, he had a bad feeling about it so he filed a WCW to Jayne in Records who I just got off the phone with. She emailed me the file.”  
Melissa sat down across from Isaac, where her laptop was positioned. Their dining table seated six and they only ever had Stiles and his father John (who Isaac could not help but notice was a little more fond of Melissa than he first realized) over, so the laptop was a constant feature at the bottom of the table. 

“’Welfare Concern Warning regarding Hope Lahey.’ Under Doctor’s Notes, Dr Wilson wrote this: “Three year old girl complaining of pain to left index and middle fingers. Second degree burns have been observed. I have prescribed child antibiotics and there is an unlikely chance of infection. Mother was absent at the time of injury and father claims the girl placed her hand on the heated plate of the family’s electrical oven cooker. However, after checking the child’s reflexes and pain response, I have drawn the conclusion that it is very unlikely that the girl would have left her hand on the hot plate long enough to suffer burns as severe as the ones that she has. Possible neglect/abuse noted.’ The file was passed onto the police who decided not to investigate.”

Isaac felt cold. 

“Why didn’t they investigate?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Because they investigated with you and couldn’t find any evidence. Another unproven allegation could have meant a harassment or misconduct lawsuit against the police department.”

Isaac nodded. 

“What about the other injuries?”

Melissa looked back to the laptop screen and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. 

“This one isn’t a WCW, it’s just from her medical records,” she said. “‘Hope Lahey, 4, suffered lesion to the back of her thighs caused by the leather strap of a hammock breaking as she sat on it. As she fell, the rough side of the strap broke the skin on her left leg and marked the skin on her right.’ I think that one could be a belt mark. But it could also just be what the report found.”

“So that’s the possibly suspicious one then?” Isaac asked. “What about the other definitely suspicious one?” 

Melissa bit her lip. Isaac could tell that she did not want to tell him and that whatever injury she was about to tell him about was caused by a man that her son and future son-in-law were less than a day away from sitting down to dinner with. He reached over and placed his hand over hers before nodding. She took a deep breath.

“This one is a SCWCW – Severe Child Welfare Concern Warning – but it was never processed. Jayne told me that Dr Patel had written it up. The hospital has a policy that says every Welfare Warning has to be kept by the original doctor for two weeks before it is processed.”

“Why?” Isaac couldn’t for the life of him work out exactly why a hospital would have a policy that could prevent helping people. Did the Hippocratic Oath mean nothing?

“So that the doctors can check their notes,” Melissa said. “The hospital makes the doctors go over their reports several times before they process them. In case the doctor has missed something or noted something down wrong. It’s stupid, I know, but it’s policy. Dr Patel was in a car accident a week after this report was dated and she died in hospital a few days later. The report hadn’t made it to the first stage of processing so not a single other doctor had investigated. Basically, nobody could validate what she was worried about so the hospital dismissed the report. Jayne kept a copy.”

She stopped and looked at him. Not the kind of look you give someone when you’re giving them your attention, but the kind of look that you have when you’re about to give someone you love horrible news. Isaac braced himself. 

“Tell me,” he whispered.

“’A red mark is visible on the skin between the child’s vagina and leg. Her mother is concerned that it is a rash. The mark resembles the shape of a finger. It is possible that the mark has resulted from somebody forcing the girl’s legs apart. She was very reluctant to show me this part of her body. In my experience, five year old girls are rarely this body conscious. The father is Joseph Lahey, who was under investigation and had one SCWCW placed against him when his son was examined for bruising of the anus and pelvis. Probable sexual abuse noted, further investigation to follow on follow-up appointment post-processing of this report. Police are also to be notified at this time.’ I’m so sorry, Isaac.”

He didn’t feel the tears on his cheek, but he knew he was crying from the tears that had gathered in his vision. Melissa moved over and hugged him tightly. 

“I know this is hard for you but we need to talk about this plan of yours,” she said. 

“I can’t let her go through what I did,” Isaac replied, his voice wavering. “I can’t let him get away with it.”

Melissa nodded and hummed soothingly, cradling his head on her shoulder. He felt childish for being held like this, but he let her hold him.

“Isaac, honey,” she said after a while. She lifted his head and he looked at her, his eyes puffy and red but no longer filled with tears. “I understand that you need to make sure that she’s alright. But please don’t do anything stupid. Help her if you can, but don’t put yourself in danger.”

Isaac nodded and held her eye until she smiled and dropped her forehead to touch his. She took his hand, and pushed something into it. As Isaac looked down, he saw that it was a small can of pepper spray. He looked back at her questioningly. 

“I hate this idea, but I know you’re set on it,” she said. “In case something goes wrong, keep this on you at all times. And promise me you won’t do anything that could get you into trouble.”

“I promise,” Isaac said. 

He felt awful. He knew that he might not be able to keep that promise. 

-

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Scott said. His voice was husky and his eyes weren’t fully open but Isaac could tell that he wasn’t in danger of falling asleep. “I thought you’d get worried.”

“If you went on a trip with your ex then I’d be a little worried,” Isaac replied. “But you went on a trip with your ex without telling your fiancé, which made me a lot worried.”

Scott smiled that adorably dopey slanted smile of his and Isaac squeezed his leg with his feet.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he said, feigning seriousness. “I know I had no reason to worry but it was a bad idea not telling me.”

“I know,” Scott replied. “I’m sorry. Kira’s my friend and I know she’s your friend too. I thought you might think I didn’t want to spend time with you, but I didn’t even stop to consider that you might think I was cheating with my ex. I should really have seen that coming.”

“Yeah, you should.” Isaac said, a smile creeping onto his face. “Now, can we not talk about your exes while I’m touching your cock?” 

Scott laughed. 

Isaac liked this more than anything. They had sex a lot and Isaac enjoyed that aspect of their relationship, but it was the lying together at night in close quarters just playing with each other’s bodies that he loved. Anyone could have sex really, there didn’t have to be any connection but this was different. This was loving and sensual. 

“Are you nervous?” Scott asked, moving his hand up rest between his fiancé’s shoulder blades and drawing a figure of eight there with his finger. 

Isaac nodded. He’d felt more and more tense as Sunday had drawn nearer. But, he had to admit, this time with Scott was helping him to relieve his tension.

“I don’t think I could ever think about my dad without being nervous,” Isaac said. “But I don’t want to talk about my dad when I’m touching your cock either.”

Scott laughed again. 

It was nearing midnight and Isaac wanted to sleep for as long as he possibly could before going to his father’s house. He wanted to be well rested and alert, in case Joseph tried anything. As if reading his thoughts, Scott turned around and pressed his back into Isaac’s chest. 

“Let’s go to sleep,” he said, lightly pressing as much of his body into Isaac’s as he could. Isaac took the hint and draped an arm over his fiancé. He pushed a leg between Scott’s and pulled one of them back so it was sandwiched between his own. 

He heard Scott let out a contented sigh and he leaned in to kiss the dark hair inches from his face. 

“’Night, I,” Scott said. “I love you.”

“Goodnight Scotty,” Isaac said. “I love you too.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isaac and Scott head to dinner with Joseph and Hope. A possibility becomes a certainty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just imagine I begin every chapter with a "I'm so sorry that I'm so terrible at keeping updated."
> 
> My beta @hellokhaleesi has returned to the land of the internet, so massive thanks to her. You know the drill; any errors/issues, please let me know. Comments/Kudos make the world go around. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Scott asked.

“No,” Isaac admitted. “I don’t want to do this at all.”

Clearly, Scott could sense the apprehension on him. But they both knew that it had nothing to do with want. Isaac _had_ to do this. He raised his hand to rap the door knocker, but Scott caught him by the arm.

“I want you to remember that I’m going to be right next to you the whole time,” he said. “I can’t imagine how difficult this is going to be for you because it’s not easy for me and I don’t have your history. We can leave at any time, I, don’t let him get to you.”

Isaac almost smiled. He covered Scott’s hand with his own for a moment and then he reached up and rapped the knocked.

Six seconds went by before the door opened and they were the six longest seconds that Isaac could remember ever experiencing. He was nervous about this, how could he not be? Reaching out, Isaac grasped Scott's hand just as the door swung open.

“ISAAC!” Hope shrieked delightedly as she ran into him and wrapped her arms around his legs. “Brother Isaac, hiya hiya hiya!”

“’Brother Isaac’,” Scott said under his breath while Isaac bent down to greet his half-sister. “She must think you’re a frat boy.”

Isaac looked up at his fiancé from between his sister’s arms. He stood up, holding Hope with an arm underneath her thighs.

“Hope, this is my fiancé, Scott,” he said to her. She looked at him and then over to Scott. For a moment, she looked a little wary and then she squirmed to be put on the floor. When Isaac obeyed, she walked forward to Scott and put her hand out like she was waiting for a handshake. Scott smiled and obliged.

“Hello, Hope,” he said, crouching down to her height. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m going to be your brother-in-law one day.”

“Brother-in-law,” Hope repeated. “I don’t know what that is but I think I like you. You have funny coloured skin and it’s pretty and so are your eyes and smile.”

Scott flushed a little and smiled.

“Thank you very much, Hope,” he said. “I think your hair is very pretty and you look like a Disney princess.”

Hope squinted her eyes like she was trying to tell if he was making fun of her. Then she hugged him.

“I like you even more now.”

Scott smirked at Isaac over her shoulder. Isaac returned it.

“Hope, come here please,” came the voice of Isaac’s father from inside the house. Isaac stiffened visibly and Scott rested a hand on his elbow. “Isaac, Scott, please come in!”

“She’s a bit eager,” Isaac said in what seemed like an attempt to delay going into the house, even if just for a second. But he sounded thoughtful too. “She’s known you two minutes and she’s already hugging you.”

“Maybe she’s just trusting,” Scott said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Isaac replied. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he stepped into the house of the man who’d robbed him of his adolescence.

 

-

 

_Isaac never expected to hit it off with Kira. He had gone to meet Stiles and Malia for a meal and Kira had been out with her mother and met them by chance. Isaac had only just gotten with Scott a few weeks before and he was concerned about how this ex-girlfriend of his current boyfriend was going to react to him. As it turns out, he needn’t have worried._

_Kira was engaging, sweet and funny. She spoke of Scott in a way that was both nostalgic and freed. She clearly didn’t miss the relationship but neither did she talk of it like it was a mistake. When Isaac got home and told Scott about their meeting, Scott reacted in the same way._

_She was everything that Isaac had expected but without the traits he’d worried about. He knew that sooner or later they would cross paths, but Isaac found he had no reason to be cautious. In fact, they gelled very quickly._

_They had a similar taste in TV shows, they liked the same books, the same movies, the same nearly everything. Isaac could totally see what Scott saw in her, and Kira said the same of him. When it came down to it, this is what made Isaac so paranoid about Kira and Scott when they spent time together; he would totally understand somebody wanting to be with this girl._

_But the thing that Isaac liked the most about Kira was that she was just a friend. She wasn’t somebody who knew about his past (although, one drunken night a few years after their first meeting, the truth did come out), she wasn’t somebody who based their whole friendship on pity or some self-serving desire to rescue him from his life; she was just a friend. Oddly, Isaac felt that she was the first real friend he’d had in a very long time._

 

-

 

“Would anybody like gravy?” Joseph asked.

“Me, me, me!” Hope shouted, excited in a way that only a child can be regarding gravy.

Joseph looked at her in an almost cold way that sent familiar shivers racing down Isaac’s spine.

“Manners, Hope,” he said, glaring at her. “You _know_ you must remember your manners.”

Isaac noted that Hope seemed to shrink back in what seemed to be a mixture of shame and guilt. He was alarmed to realize that she also looked scared.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” he asked, beginning to break into a cold sweat.

His father looked at him and smiled.

“Yes, of course,” he said sickly-sweetly. “Though, don’t be too long, your food will go cold.”

Isaac tugged at Scott’s sleeve in a clear signal for him to follow. When the two reached the bathroom at the foot of the stairs, Isaac pulled his fiancé in and bolted the door.

“Scott, she’s scared of him,” he said. It took a tremendous amount of effort to keep the desperation out of his voice. They were only at the beginning of their second course and already Isaac found himself convinced that Hope needed help. “I think I was right about this.”

Scott nodded slowly.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “She seems tense whenever she does something wrong. Like, more tense than a kid would normally be anyway.”

“Exactly,” Isaac said. He didn’t know exactly how to articulate his feelings to Scott but he didn’t really have to stop and think about Hope’s situation; he knew that she was being abused. He recognized the signs, even in someone as young as his half-sister. After all, he’d been a victim of abuse by the same man for several years of his life.

Scott grasped Isaac’s hand and squeezed tightly.

“We can get through this,” he said. “If we can find any solid proof, we’ll report it as soon as we get home.”

Isaac nodded. He allowed Scott to move out of the room. Taking a deep breath, he followed.

 

-

 

The mood in the dining room was subdued. The four of them had just finished their desert and Isaac was finding the whole situation too much. Clearly, Scott was too. Even Hope had picked up on the fact that something was amiss. The only person that seemed truly comfortable with the situation was Joseph himself.

“Scott, would you mind helping me with the dishes?” Joseph asked.

A little surprised, Scott nodded and got to his feet. When the two had left the room, Isaac turned to Hope.

“How are you doing, Hope?” he asked. “Are you alright? Everything okay here at home?”

Hope nodded.

“Daddy says I should always say ‘yes’ when somebody asks if I’m okay,” she said matter-of-factly, completely unaware of how much this sentence would affect her brother.

“What do you mean he says that?” he asked. “So you should always say ‘yes’ when you’re asked that, even if it’s not true?”

Hope nodded. She reached over and grabbed Isaac’s hand. Absent-mindedly, she began to circle his hand with her finger.

“I’m not supposed to tell people if I’m not okay but I’m always okay, Daddy says, so it doesn’t matter because that means I’m not telling a lie,” she said.

Isaac was incredulous.

“Do you ever not feel okay, even when Daddy says you are?” he asked.

“Yes, sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I’m having a sore day and Daddy says I’m okay but I don’t feel like I’m okay but if Daddy says I’m okay then I must be okay because family doesn’t lie to family,” she said.

Isaac stared at her. ‘Sore day?’ He was about to press her when she continued.

“Daddy says I’m not allowed to tell anybody about my sore days, but you are my family so I can tell you can’t I?”

Isaac nodded.

“What is a sore day, Hope? Does Daddy make you sore sometimes?” he asked.

Hope visibly hesitated and checked over her shoulder, looking for her father. Isaac turned his hand over and held hers in his.

“Remember, family doesn’t lie to family,” he added, hoping that this would make her comfortable enough to admit the truth quickly. It worked.

“Yes, sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes Daddy makes me have a sore day but he says that he loves me and that I have to have sore days because sometimes I’m naughty and sore days are my way of saying sorry to God for being naughty.”

Isaac nearly vomited on the spot.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Try to keep Daddy happy, yes? If you do that, you won’t have many sore days because you won’t be being naughty.”

She nodded. Isaac hated himself for lying to her and making her feel like ‘sore days’ were something that she deserved, but he couldn’t think of another way to get her to understand the importance of keeping their father happy.

“Does Daddy ever touch you in places underneath your clothes?” he asked, nausea rippling through his body.

Hope nodded.

“He touches me sometimes where I pee from,” she said. “I don’t know why he does that but he says that I’m good when I let him do that.”

Isaac felt a wave of fury drown out the nausea. But he knew that he couldn’t lose his cool now. If he did, he would’ve been just as in the wrong as if he’d abused Hope himself considering he’d be throwing away the one chance he had to stop this happening. He took a long, deep breath to steady himself.

“Okay,” he said. “You can’t tell Daddy about any of this because he will think you’ve been naughty. And you don’t need to have a sore day to say sorry to God because I’ll say sorry for you. And I know you shouldn’t lie, but if he doesn’t ask, it’s not lying is it?”

Hope looked deep into Isaac’s eyes. For a moment, he felt as if she were staring directly into his mind.  It was unnerving. After a few seconds, she shook her head.

“No, it’s not lying,” she said.

 

-

 

As Isaac was about to leave, Hope jumped up and held around his neck. Isaac lifted her up and kissed her on the cheek.

“I’m glad you two get on well,” Joseph said. “It’s nice to see you together. I never thought I’d see it happen.”

 _And hopefully you never will again,_ Isaac thought, _because you’ll be rotting in a fucking prison cell._

It was then that he had perhaps the most genius idea of his life.

“Hey, Hope,” he said. “Would you like to come and stay with Scott and me one night - if Daddy’s okay with it, of course?”

Joseph’s smile momentarily faltered but he collected himself.

“Yes, that would be nice, I imagine,” he said. “When did you have in mind?”

Isaac looked at Scott, who mouthed ‘Thursday?’ back at him.

“How does Thursday sound? She’s not back at school yet, is she?” Isaac asked his father.

“No, she doesn’t start back for a few weeks,” Joseph said. “Do you like the sound of that? Would you like to stay with Isaac on Thursday?”

Hope nodded vigorously.

“Yes please,” she shrieked joyously.

“Then it’s a date,” Isaac said, feeling his self-restraint beginning to really tire him out. “So you’ll come and stay with Scott and me, and you can meet our friends in one, two, three, four, five sleeps time, okay?”

Hope smiled and hugged him tighter. She let go and leant over towards Scott who took her out of Isaac’s hands and hugged her too.

“Maybe if you’re lucky and really good,” Scott said. “My mummy will make you some special cookies!”

Hope giggled and kissed him on the cheek.

“See you Thursday!” she said as Scott put her down.

“Love you, brothers!” she added, and disappeared back into the house.

“We’ll pick her up around 5?” Isaac said, half-stating, half-asking.

“That sounds alright,” Joseph said. “Just don’t be late; I’m going on a training course at 6 until 8. That reminds me, I’ll have to cancel the babysitter!”

Isaac nodded.

“I’ll go and start the car,” Scott said.

When he was out of earshot, Joseph spoke again.

“It has been nice to see you, Isaac,” he said. “I do miss you sometimes.”

He reached forward and stroked Isaac’s cheek. Isaac recoiled in disgust.

“I see you don’t feel the same,” he said. In the space of seconds, his face had changed from something respectable and almost affectionate to something horrible and sinister. A cruel smile played on his lips as he spoke. “That’s a shame. I hope your pet enjoys you as much as I did once.”

Isaac’s anger boiled over but he knew that he couldn’t make a scene. Also, he knew that his father was both stronger and quicker than he was. And he could inflict real damage before Scott would even know something was wrong.

“Have fun on Thursday,” he smirked. “Perhaps you can compare scars.”

The door slammed and Isaac couldn’t tell whether he wanted to scream or cry more. He now had total validation of the abuse. He just could not believe how upfront Hope had been. And he was shocked at how freely Joseph had rubbed it in his face. He felt dirty and violated. He hoped that Hope wouldn’t suffer too much over the coming days.

As he turned to leave, he caught a glare of light coming from beneath him. Its source was a key to the house, just poking out from underneath the doormat. Isaac looked around to check for any witnesses, quickly bent down and swiped it. He turned away.

 _Five sleeps, Hope,_ he thought, _and then I will make sure that you’re free of him forever._

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isaac comes clean, endangering his future. Melissa has a near-miss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look who's getting better at updating more regularly! I'm actually a chapter ahead now and I should have time to write at least three times a week so hopefully I'm going to make this fic a weekly update (more frequently when college is on break). 
> 
> This chapter involves a little sexiness so be prepared. It's not totally graphic but there is enough to warrant a warning. If this isn't something you want to read and you're just here for the story, there's nothing important in it that won't be revisited. The scene begins with "Oh my... fuck," so just end the chapter there if you don't want to read the sexy. 
> 
> Once again, a massive thank you for the comments and the kudos! (Sidenote: massive fangirl moment for me as Gstarross left a comment on my last chapter who has written not one but two of my favourite scisaac fics (further sidenote, if you haven't already, search Scarred and Not For Ever when you get the chance, totally worth it!) so I must be doing something right!) Happy reading guys, but prepare yourself, the next couple of chapters is where shit hits the fan.
> 
> As always, if you spot a continuity/grammatical error, please private message me and let me know. It's a massive help!
> 
> Shoutout to the one, the only @hellokhaleesi

Wednesday evening felt like the longest few hours of Isaac’s life. He worked 9 to 5 every day except for Wednesdays when he started and finished his shift an hour earlier. He beat Scott home by well over an hour and Melissa was working the afternoon shift that day, so he had the house to himself. He decided to spend his free time sitting in the lounge, thinking about how he could rescue Hope.

No matter what plans came into Isaac’s head, he discounted them. Could he take her to hospital and come clean about the root of her injuries? No, if he did that, they might not believe him and if they told his father, he’d never have access to his sister again. Could he go to Sheriff Stilinski? No, he knew that the Sheriff had investigated Joseph’s abuse before and another failed investigation could lead to a harassment lawsuit. There was only one option that Isaac could actually see working – and it scared him shitless.

Isaac had never been one of those people that follow the law to the letter. He smoked his share of marijuana, drank underage, got into a few fights, and even at one point had sex in a public area in quite clear sight of anybody who looked their way (which Scott, of course, would deny to his deathbed). But this was different. This was a felony.

And yet, Isaac couldn’t think of any other way that he could save his sister from her fate. She would live her life the same way Isaac had. The difference being that her abuse started a good ten years earlier than Isaac’s had. It made him shudder to think about how much of an effect this sort of trauma could have on a young girl’s mind. He knew that abuse victims had one of the highest suicide rates in America; Isaac doubted she’d reach her 16th birthday if it continued.

He couldn’t let it happen. Under no circumstances was he going to let Hope suffer any more than she already had. He owed it to her, to himself, and to the memory of his mother and brother to stop it.

 _Tomorrow it ends,_ Isaac thought. _Tomorrow, I’m going to kidnap my sister._

 

-

 

Scott knew that there was something really bugging Isaac. He couldn’t put his finger exactly on the problem but in the space of roughly two weeks, his boyfriend had discovered that he had a sister, and that she was being abused. It couldn’t have been easy for him, Scott surmised.

As he drove through his lifetime home town, he remembered all of the good times that he’d had there.

He drove past the high school that he’d spent a crazy few years at, the car park in which he’d found a stray dog with a broken leg and realized he wanted to be a vet, the abandoned bank that he and Stiles had broken into and gotten drunk for the first time ever, and the dingy club in which he’d first kissed Isaac.

He remembered that there had been many a bad time too; his father leaving, his aunt dying, his mother’s financial problems. Now that he thought about it, there were more bad times than he’d ever realized. But still, he loved this town.

And yet, he couldn’t help but hope for a future away from Beacon Hills. A future in which he and Isaac would own a big house near the sea in Southern California, maybe Long Beach or Santa Monica; somewhere with a huge city vibe that was still close to the countryside and, more importantly, home.

He imagined a life where he and Isaac could walk their children to the beach on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe the kids could take a friend each. He’d be making enough amount of money from his veterinarian job to cover all the bills so whatever Isaac brought in would be their disposable income. That way they’d not only be able to treat their kids, but it would give Isaac the freedom to finally try to make it as a writer.

Scott was going to save up his salary as a newly qualified vet, and Isaac had the inheritance from his mother. When they moved out, Melissa was going to sell the family home and move in with Sheriff Stilinski – or John, as Scott supposed he should call the man who was a lifelong father figure and probably his future stepdad – and make them a gift of the money she made. The three sources of money combined would mean that Scott and Isaac would be able to buy their new home outright.

Every time that Isaac became detached or depressed, Scott would retreat into this dream. Isolation gave Isaac comfort; Scott drew his from hope.

Thinking about hope made Scott wonder if his newly-found future half-sister-in-law would be interested in helping to raise her nieces and nephews. He hoped that she would. After all, he really was quite fond of her, even after only one meeting, and he saw no other way to rescue her from her father than to get her as far away as possible from him.

 

-

 

**We need to talk ASAP.**

Scott didn’t like the sound of that at all. The message had come through to his phone just as he pulled into his driveway. ASAP really was quite soon, and Isaac had a habit of going overboard with kisses at the end of texts so the total absence of them was worrying.

He opened the car door and looked up to the house. It was still daylight but a light was on in the lounge. He checked his phone for the time; 5:40. Isaac would definitely be finished work and Melissa would definitely not be so it didn’t take a genius to guess who would be in. 

Scott walked up to the house and opened the door. It was unlocked, confirming that it was Isaac in the house – Melissa always locked the door when she was in.

“Isaac?” he called tentatively.

“Lounge,” his fiancé called back.

Scott wasn’t crazily nervous. Isaac had a habit of being a little over dramatic with everything – a trait that Scott found more endearing than anything else. But he just couldn’t deny the feeling of anxiety building inside him.

“What do you need to talk to me about?” He asked upon entering the room.

Isaac looked at him from where he was leaning against the window ledge and nodded at the pair of armchairs in the corner of the room, motioning for Scott to take a seat. Two ready-made cups of coffee were atop the glass table in front of them. Scott sat down and Isaac followed.

“Come on,” Scott said. “You’re making me really nervous.”

“Okay,” Isaac said. He sat down on the arm of the chair so that he was facing Scott. It took him a few moments to calm himself down. He was tense and shifty, Scott noted.

“Before I tell you what I’m going to tell you,” he began, “I know that you’re going to have a problem with it and I can’t deal with the judgement.”

Scott nodded, hoping that Isaac was going to opt for a quick version of events – the suspense was killing him.

“Tomorrow, when Hope comes to stay, I’m not going to let her go home. I’ve invited Stiles, Lydia, Malia and Kira over to meet her and when they go I’m going to put her to bed. After your mom’s asleep, I’m taking her. I don’t know where just yet, but I can’t let her go back to my dad. I’m going to stay away with her until I can either find someone responsible in her family that I can take her to, or I’m going to tell the police about everything and make them investigate before I give her back. Hopefully it won’t come to the second one because that’s a lot more hostage-y.

I was just going to wait until you were asleep and leave you a note but I think you deserve more than that. Before you say anything, there’s nothing that you can say to me that’s going to change my mind and I really am not in the mood for judgement seeing as this pretty much means putting us on hold for who knows how long and I don’t want to do that but I don’t see any other way.”

Scott felt his mouth open about halfway through Isaac’s speech and it didn’t close until a good minute after the end. When he regained control over his jaw muscles, he moved to speak but Isaac cut him off.

“I want you to know that I love you so much,” he said, his tone begging for understanding. “Nothing I do is going to change that but I need to get Hope away from him. I’ll do anything.”

“I know,” Scott heard himself say. “I understand. But Isaac, think about how this could affect your future.”

“Right now,” Isaac said. “The only future I care about is hers.”

“And what if it doesn’t work? What’ll happen if you take her and all that happens is that you get arrested and she goes back to live with your dad?”

“Well then, at least I tried.”

As much as Scott hated to admit it, he understood why Isaac had come to this conclusion. There really was no other way to go about helping Hope. Going down the legal route wasn’t an option, so the illegal route was the only other way. But Scott wasn’t going to let Isaac do that alone.

“How are you going to take her?”

 “My car,” he said.

“Not happening,” Scott replied. “That fucking thing’s a death trap. We’ll take my car.”

“We?” Isaac repeated with a dumbstruck look on his face.

“Do you think I’m going to let you do something so monumentally stupid on your own?” Scott asked. “I can put vet training off for a while if I need to. I prepaid for the course so I could just pick up where I’ve left off next year if I want. I agree with what you want to do even if it’s probably totally going to mess up somehow. But I trust you and I’m not letting you do this alone. “

Isaac just stared at him.

“I get that you want to help her, I really do,” Scott said. “I can’t imagine what she’s going through and I know it must be hard for you because you went through the same. You’re my family, and she is too now. So yeah, if we have to take a risk to save her, then so be it.”

Isaac didn’t say anything. To be honest, he didn’t really look like he had the capacity to do so. So Scott took the initiative and stood up and wrapped his arms around his fiancé. He kissed Isaac then, feeling a little odd as Isaac was still half sitting making the taller man the shorter in the situation. Scott got a strange feeling from being taller than his future husband.

“Thank you,” Isaac said, breaking the kiss.

Scott just smiled and went back to it.

 

-

 

“Oh my… fuck,” Isaac almost howled. They knew that they didn’t have long until Melissa came home and the day’s events had led to a rather unsexy climax. So what had been intended as a ‘quickie’ had stretched out into a race to ejaculate before Scott’s mom caught them on the armchair in the lounge.

This new danger of being walked in on was both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. Admittedly, Scott had no desire to have his mom see him with Isaac’s cock halfway down his windpipe but the knowledge that she could walk in at any moment was the most surprisingly arousing feelings he’d ever experienced. Clearly, it wasn’t the same for Isaac though.

Scott was trying to rethink his strategy; he wasn’t going to stop without making his fiancé come and Isaac just didn’t seem to be ready to do so. Quickly lubing up his index and middle finger with saliva, Scott pushed them inside Isaac and upped the intensity of his blow job.

Scott found it funny that he knew the inside of Isaac’s ass as well as he knew the back of his own hand. Probably better actually, seeing as knowing exactly where to put his fingers inside Isaac was more important to him than memorizing what his own hand looked like. When he’d stretched Isaac out a little bit, it took him less than a second to find his prostate. And that’s when Scott knew he’d hit a winner.

Isaac began writhing and moaning at a much faster tempo. Unconsciously, he began to thrust into Scott’s mouth.

After that, it took roughly thirty seconds to bring about the beginnings of the orgasm that Scott had been trying to get for well over half an hour. He had to commend Isaac’s longevity – though he would have rather experienced the sudden emergence of stamina when they were both getting serious pleasure from it.

As Isaac’s skin began to twitch and contract on Scott’s chin, he knew there were only seconds left before ejaculation.

And it was at that moment that Melissa McCall decided to open the front door.

Panicking, Scott pulled off and out just in time for his face to be covered with the first stream of Isaac’s come.

“Boys?” Melissa called. Scott stood up quickly and regretted it instantly – his jeans weren’t baggy and his cock was rock hard. But he knew he had maybe ten seconds to react before his mom checked the first room that she’d come to after the kitchen.

He saw a blanket on the floor poking out from behind the chair and seized it. He pulled Isaac’s jeans up as far as he could with one tug – he got them halfway up his thighs – and covered himself with the blanket as he sat on Isaac’s lap. He curled his body around Isaac’s, nuzzled his semen-coated face into his fiancé’s shoulder and adjusted his body so that his back was to the door.

“What’re you-?” Isaac began.

“Mom,” Scott whispered, and let his head loll, hoping that his mother would assume he was asleep.

Isaac tried to look over at his legs, but Scott and the blanket blocked his view. He hoped that the blanket was covering his bare thighs and cock, or at least that Scott was.

Melissa entered the room, looking exhausted. Isaac sagged his eyelids a little to try and look like he’d just woken up.

“Hey boys,” she said. “Oh. I mean, hey boy. Is he asleep?”

Isaac nodded.

“Did I wake you up?”

Isaac nodded again.

“Have you eaten yet?”

Isaac shook his head.

“I’m ordering pizza. Pepperoni, ham and jalapeño peppers?”

Isaac smiled and nodded once again.

“Are you okay?” Melissa asked.

“Yeah,” Isaac said, using all of his willpower to not giggle. “I’m just really tired.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, wake him up. You two can clear the kitchen while I go and take a bath. There’s cash on the counter so just order the pizza now.”

“Okay,” Isaac said. “I’ll do it in a sec.”

She smiled and left the room. He heaved a sigh of relief that Scott echoed, lifting his head from Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac laughed.

The come had begun to solidify on Scott’s face and it was very noticeable. Like, extremely, light-reflecting sort of noticeable. Isaac had to admit though; he was impressed with Scott’s improvisational skills… amongst other things.

“I think she’s already upstairs. You can get up now,” Isaac said.

“Maybe I like sitting on your cock,” Scott smirked.

“More than you like sucking it?” Isaac replied.

Scott shrugged.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Well maybe we can find out which one you like more tonight,” Isaac said. “But for now, you need to clean yourself up. You look like you fell face first into a bowl of milk.”

Scott laughed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isaac prepares to bring his plan into motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait for this one, I lost track of this with all my college work. I had this chapter finished a few days ago but I wanted to get a few chapters ahead to avoid this happening again. Also, I now have a laptop that's small enough and has a good enough battery life to take everywhere so buses, trains, library, etc, I'm gonna be writing.
> 
> Once again, thank you for the comments and the kudos and the views. I really do appreciate it, I hope you enjoy this fic as much as I'm enjoying writing it.

As soon as his lunch break had ended at 1, Isaac was checking the clock every few minutes. The afternoon seemed to drag on and on. He was to finish at 5 and head home where Scott would be waiting with Hope. Around an hour later, their friends would arrive to meet the little girl and Isaac would slip out and head over to his sister’s house. Once there, he would let himself in and gather as many clothes of Hope’s that he could without drawing attention to himself from the neighbours. Then, he’d return home and wait for his friends to leave.

Although he and Scott hadn’t really discussed it, he supposed that it would then be time to take Hope and make their getaway. Melissa would be out until late on the night shift and so wouldn’t happen to wake up and catch them leaving. Isaac felt very bad about just abandoning Melissa like that, but deep down he knew that she’d understand. She had to understand.

The real issue would be to decide on where they were going to go. Isaac had a maternal great-aunt in Detroit who would certainly take them in, but he couldn’t see Hope being at all happy with travelling over halfway across the country. Scott’s father was still in San Francisco but they hadn’t spoken in years, and Raphael had connections to both the FBI and the state police anyway so that option was completely out of the picture. Isaac had no real alternative; he just hoped that Scott would have a plan, or that a brainwave would strike at the right moment.

“Excuse me,” a young man said to Isaac. “Could you help me with a wardrobe please?”

Isaac broke his thoughts to go and help the guy. Working eight hour shifts in a furniture store had never really been a life dream of his, but it was good money and fairly easy. The only problem was the boredom. Sometimes the store was so dead that an hour would pass without a single person approaching him. He’d pass the time by tidying or restocking the baskets in front of his cash register that were perpetually half-filled with screwdrivers, batteries and other things that you’d think people would need in a furniture store, but that in reality often lay untouched for months.

“Redecorating?” Isaac asked the guy, placing a hand under the bottom edge of the wardrobe. He figured a conversation might help time pass a little quicker.

The guy nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Had a break up, I just fancy a change.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Isaac said sincerely.

“I’m not,” the guy smiled. “She was a dick.”

Isaac laughed.

Between the two of them, the wardrobe was no trouble at all. Isaac wasn’t as scrawny as he’d once been and tall, dark and handsome had muscles that you could see through his shirt. As they set the wardrobe down by the cash register, the guy straightened up and smiled. He offered out his hand.

“I’m Derek,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you, Isaac.”

Isaac reddened slightly but he shook Derek’s hand anyway.

“You too,” he said. “Um, how did you know my name?”

Derek squinted an eye and raised the opposite brow.

“You’re wearing a name tag.”

“Oh right.”

 

-

 

As Isaac walked the fairly short journey back home, he thought about the conversation he’d struck up with the stranger called Derek. It had only been a few minutes that they’d chatted for but Isaac got an unnerving feeling that this random customer knew exactly what was going through his head.

It was a feeling that he’d grown accustomed to throughout the time he’d spent living with his father but this was the first time he’d ever gotten such a vibe from a stranger, and it freaked him out.

Isaac had made an innocent comment, saying that Derek looked quite familiar.

“You might have seen me before,” Derek had said. “My sister and me live a ten minute drive from here.”

And then Derek had asked if Isaac had any siblings.

“A brother,” Isaac replied. “But he died. I have a sister too,” he added as an afterthought, realizing that it had been a very long time since he’d been able to honestly tell someone that he had a living sibling.

And then Derek had said something that totally unsettled Isaac.

“Yeah, we’ve gotta do anything to protect our little sisters, right?”

In hindsight, it was probably just an innocent comment. In fact, it was almost certainly just that. But Isaac couldn’t stop the uncomfortable guilty feeling from building up. And even three hours after he’d seen the back of Derek, he still couldn’t shake it.

Isaac knew that kidnap was a crime and that crimes are generally wrong. Not many laws were made without good reason. But there was also a part of him that believed with total conviction that this would be a justified crime; a crime that he would commit for the good of another person. He was going to rescue her, not endanger her. Perhaps she might not understand his reasoning immediately, but Hope knew that what her father did was wrong. He was sure of it.

No amount of coincidentally relatable strangers would ever have been able to change his mind.

 

-

 

“ISAAC!”

He hadn’t even closed the door behind him when a near eight foot tall lump of evil pounced on him. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that Isaac nearly shit himself.

“Was that necessary?” he asked, sounding even more annoyed than he felt. Scott’s face dropped a little and he realized that he had no reason to be annoyed at his fiancé and sister. “I’m sorry.”

He pulled Hope into a hug from on top of Scott’s shoulders and squeezed her tight. Either she didn’t notice that there was anything amiss, or she forgave him really quickly, but it didn’t matter to Isaac. He held her warm body against his own cool one and ran his fingers down her neck until she shivered.

“You’re cold!” she giggled, trying – and failing – to wriggle out of Isaac’s grasp.

“You’re warm!” Isaac said, a sincere smile touching his lips for the first time in what felt like years. He kissed her on the nose and put her down on the ground.

“Why don’t we play a game?” he said.

“GAME GAME GAME!” Hope screamed in ecstasy.

“Okay,” Isaac said. “The game is called ‘find where I hid the chocolate and you can have a bar’.”

Hope squealed and ran off into the kitchen. Scott watched her leave and turned back to Isaac smiling a little.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” Isaac said. “I shouldn’t have snapped but some guy really gave me the creeps earlier and now I can’t get it out of my head.”

“Would it help if you talked about it?”

“No, but it would help if you distracted me.”

Scott grinned as Isaac pulled him in for a kiss. When Isaac’s left hand went to rest beneath his jaw though, Scott jumped.

“What’s wrong?” Isaac asked. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Scott smiled. “She was right; your hands are fucking freezing.”

 

-

 

Stiles and Lydia arrived together, as did Kira and Malia. By 6:15, the seven of them were spread out across the lounge area with Hope the centre of attention.

She danced and giggled in the presence of everyone – clearly being the focus of six different people at once was alien to her, but it was a new experience that she was relishing. Her slight shyness disappeared completely as soon as she had realized that everybody there had brought sweets and games.

Kira and Malia were absolutely taken with her immediately. The three girls crawled around the floor in pursuit of each other. Stiles and Lydia remained on the sofa, but joined in whenever Hope came close.

Isaac stood in the door frame and watched, a smile playing on his lips. While Malia and Kira were clearly going a little over the top in order to please Hope, Scott was going miles over. He’d taken a purple feather boa and draped it around his neck, above the dog onesie that he had on. Crawling on all fours, he was committing to his portrayal of a dog, and Hope absolutely loved it.

Her shrieking laughter was much louder than a person would expect from someone so small. Scott looked up at Isaac a little alarmed. They held each other’s gaze for a second or two – Scott realized quickly that there was nothing to be alarmed about – and Isaac gestured for him to follow him into the hallway.

“Hey,” Scott said, upon closing the lounge door behind him.

“I’m going to… you know,” Isaac replied.

“What?” Scott asked. “Break into your dad’s house?”

Isaac nodded. It sounded absurd when he put it like that.

“Just be careful,” Scott smiled. “Obviously, this is quite a dodgy thing we’re gonna do. Make sure your dad isn’t there.”

Isaac laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “I was going to just break in without checking. I have a key though.”

“Key or no key,” Scott said. “It’s still illegal. Don’t get caught.”

Isaac smiled and kissed him. Scott held on for a little bit longer than was necessary, but the two of them quickly jumped apart at the sound of “SCOTT” coming from the other side of the door.

“Right,” Isaac said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

 

-

 

He had to admit, it was strange being inside his father’s house. Although this wasn’t where he himself had grown up, Isaac could feel Joseph’s presence and influence all over. He decided that the easiest way to do this was to get in and get out as quickly as possible – without any distractions.

Ignoring the photographs on the walls, and the doors to his right, he moved up the stairs and onto the first floor landing. Only three doors led off from the top floor landing. One was open and Isaac could clearly see that it was Joseph’s bedroom. The colouring and style was very similar to that of his bedroom at their old home.

The staircase was a grand thing; eighteen steps ran up the wall on the left-hand side of the house. The house itself was not even; the ground floor was about twice the size of the floor above it. The top floor was as long as the staircase and as wide as the rest of the house. The upstairs landing was L-shaped with the stairs meeting the short side of the L. Joseph’s bedroom was the furthest door away from the staircase. The two doors that stood between the room and Isaac were close.

Sweating, Isaac reached out and opened the first door. It was a room, painted pink with a bunk-bed against the far wall and toys littered across the floor. Isaac let the backpack he’d brought slide down his arm and into his hand. He opened it as he approached the wardrobe.

There was no real decision making involved in choosing what clothes to take. It was just a case of picking up whatever caught Isaac’s eye. He made sure that he took a variety; ten dresses wouldn’t help on a cold and rainy day.

Once he was satisfied, Isaac thought about what else he needed. He thought about getting her toothbrush but decided against it; Joseph might notice that it was gone before they’d even set on their way, and in any case, toothbrushes weren’t expensive.

He looked over at Hope’s bed and saw the small teddy on the pillow. He picked it up and stuffed it into the now bulging bag.

“Think that’s everything,” Isaac said aloud to himself.

In his mind he went through the checklist of what he’d retrieved and what he was missing. His mind drew a blank when considering the latter.

He closed Hope’s door securely behind him and hoped that Joseph wouldn’t look in Hope’s room, or at least not too in-depth.

On his way out, Isaac allowed himself a pause. A picture hanging above the staircase had caught his eye and as he looked at it, his mother, his brother and he himself looked back out at him.

The picture had been taken when Isaac was only six or seven. Camden was maybe twelve or perhaps a little older. And their mother was a little over thirty and looked absolutely beautiful. Her fair hair fell down to her smile which in turn was emphasised by the light make up. Her blue eyes that shone like they were the focus of the picture – and Isaac would have struggled to argue otherwise – seemed to brighten the entire world by just a fraction.

Camden was tall despite being fairly young. He was at the stage of his life when puberty was beginning to take effect and his face was a mess of spots, sweat and dirt. Clearly, personal hygiene wasn’t something that interested his brother in his youth. Yet, there were traces of the handsome man that the young boy became. His jawline was sharp, and his eyes were soft and kind.

Between the two of them was Isaac. He was short and scrawny, all bone and no meat. But his eyes were squeezed shut in a hysterical laugh and his cheeks were red from the effort.

Isaac smiled sadly at the picture. He remembered the day it was taken. The three of them had been preparing for a family photo. Joseph had been late home so Isaac and Camden talked their mom into taking the picture without him. Apparently Joseph’s car had broken down and he’d walked the last five miles home in order to make the picture. Isaac was laughing so hysterically because just as the picture was about to be taken, he saw his father through the lounge window, sweating and exhausted.

And when Joseph saw Isaac laughing at him, he didn’t get angry, he didn’t shout and he didn’t hit. He smiled.

Isaac locked the front door behind him and replaced the key under the mat. Part of him wished that he’d never seen the photo.

 

-

 

Once Isaac returned home, he knew something was amiss. When he walked back into the lounge having already dumped the backpack in the closet, he was met with four pairs of angry-looking eyes. Scott looked sheepish; Hope was oblivious.

 _Shit,_ Isaac thought. _They know._

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ten days is fairly good for me I think! Hope you guys enjoy this one, this is where we start really cooking.

“So you’re just going to take her?” Lydia asked. She had the look of a person who believed what she was hearing, but wished that she didn’t.

“Yes,” Isaac said. “It’s the only way I can think of that might actually get her away from him.”

“You’ll be messing up your life though,” Lydia argued. “If you get caught and charged for this, you’ll go to jail for a long time. You’ll never get a decent job and you’ll struggle through life with a criminal record.”

Isaac rolled his eyes. Apart from the obvious worry about being reported, this was the exact reason that he didn’t want his friends to find out about his plan.

“Listen,” Isaac said. “I don’t care about that. If I can’t protect my little sister, what’s the point in having a decent job? I couldn’t go to a flashy 9 to 5 every day for a six figure salary if I knew it was my fault that my sister had lost her entire childhood because I didn’t try to save her from a twisted, abusive rapist.”

Lydia didn’t reply. Isaac wondered why everyone in the room was looking at him in a horrified way. Then, he realized that he’d just labelled his father a rapist, and nobody in the room apart from Scott knew the story in that much depth.

“I’ll kill him,” Malia growled. She moved towards the door, seemingly going to go and make good on her statement but Isaac stopped her. 

“Don’t do anything,” he said. “Anything happens to him, Hope goes into care and I never see her again.” 

“Isaac,” Malia said. There was something in her voice that suggested that she was close to tears. Isaac had never seen her cry before so he dismissed the idea. “Did he ever… do that to you?” 

Silence. 

Isaac felt himself break out into a sweat. It was all going to come out and he really couldn’t deal with this baggage.

He nodded almost imperceptibly, but it was enough. Lydia and Kira both gasped. Malia’s shaky voice was joined by a few droplets of water gathering in her eyes. Stiles’s jaw clenched and he walked over to Hope and grabbed a toy train in a successful attempt to distract her from the tension that she’d finally noticed.

“I’m so sorry,” Malia said. “I can’t… I knew he was a cunt. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do it,” Isaac said. He felt strangely calm seeing as his four best friends had just found out his darkest secret. “The past is the past.”

“But still,” Kira said. “I don’t want to be the girl that quotes the Lion King in a serious conversation but ‘the past can hurt.’”

“The Lion King!” Isaac exclaimed, out of the blue. At this point, everyone in the room looked at him like his sanity had totally deserted him. “No, hear me out. ‘The past can hurt. You can either run from it or learn from it’ right? So I can run from it and let Hope go through what I did or I can learn from it and put a fucking stop to it.”

“Isaac Lahey,” Stiles said. “Using Disney to justify kidnap since 1999.”

Isaac glared at him.

“I’m not going to stand here and be judged for this. Yeah, I get it, I’m committing a crime. I shouldn’t kidnap my sister. I should probably go to the police. But here’s the thing, Stiles, I have gone to the police. Three times, I went to see the police when I lived with my dad, do you know how many times I was listened to?”

Stiles didn’t say anything. Somehow, he seemed to know that it wasn’t three out of three.

“Once!” Isaac continued, getting angrier and angrier. “Three times I went to the police and told them I was being raped. Not just beaten up – which I clearly had the fucking bruises for – but I was regularly being raped by my fucking dad and I was taken seriously once. Your dad is a good guy and I’ll always be grateful for him trying to help but amongst cops, he’s a dying breed. If I have to kidnap my sister in order to protect her I will.”

“Being abused isn’t something that anybody deserves,” he carried on after being met with a solemn silence. “I struggled through being a teenager. If it weren’t for you guys, I’d either have killed him or myself. I’d literally either be in a prison or a graveyard. I will do what I think I have to and I’m happy to take responsibility for my actions if the time comes. I’ll do time if it means protecting her. I’m not asking you to understand, I’m asking you to stay out of my way.”

A long silence stretched out. Only Hope, giggling as she played, looked anything other than majorly depressed. After a minute or so, Malia spoke.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m with you.”

“Thank you,” said Isaac. 

Kira nodded after a few seconds.

“I understand,” she said. “Obviously, I won’t be jumping in a car on a major getaway with you guys but I won’t try and stop you.”

Isaac smiled. The weight upon his shoulders was gradually disappearing. 

Eventually Stiles got up and walked over to Isaac. He pulled him into a hug.

“I’m sorry about what you went through but I still think this is a stupid as fuck idea. Won’t stop you though; just don’t make any decisions that Scott wouldn’t make.”

Isaac’s lips tightened at the dig. Though he hugged Stiles back, he knew he really hated his friend sometimes. But this was the best he could have hoped for really. Now only Lydia remained a problem.

“Lydia?” Scott asked, clearly trying to cajole her into some sort of answer. They could make their escape on the back of a police call, but it was neither Scott nor Isaac’s ideal scenario. 

She grimaced in response to the encouragement. Isaac could clearly see that she was struggling between her morals and instinct, and her trust and love for him. Her lips were pursed and pressed together, and she looked sad. 

“I don’t agree with what you’re doing,” she said. “I don’t think that it’s right and I think that there are better things that you can do. I think you’re smart enough to know that you’re fucking up your future here. Do you genuinely think that it’ll help her, taking her away from here?”

“Yes,” Isaac said, and to his surprise Scott also spoke. “Definitely.” 

“Fine,” Lydia said. “I think you’re both naïve to think so, but I won’t stop you and I won’t tell a soul.” 

“Thank you,” Isaac said. He wanted to say something else, to thank Lydia more, and to promise her that he’d always do his best for the little girl, but Stiles cut him off.

“You’re going too?” he asked.

He was directing the question at Scott. Though Isaac was angry at Scott for telling them – how else could they have found out? – he did feel a little sorry for his fiancé. Clearly he hadn’t expected to face any questions.

“Scott,” Stiles said. “This plan is fucking stupid. You going to kidnap a kid? In whose mind is that ever a good idea under any circumstances?”

“Look Stiles,” Scott said, clearly uncomfortably. “I don’t think it’s the best plan in the world but I know what that cunt’s capable of – and I’m not going to sit back and watch the inevitable. We know that Hope’s being abused, we’re not letting it continue.”

“If you know that it’s happening, go to the police!” Stiles said in a raising voice. “They can help and you won’t fuck your life up.”

“Stiles, we have no proof,” Scott reasoned. “And even if we did, it would have to be solid and airtight. Your dad won’t reopen a ‘proven innocent’ case, even if he knows the guy is guilty, for evidence that might not even get a conviction. You and I both know that the department could get sued for harassment, and your dad would lose his job.”

Stiles looked like he was going to speak but Isaac had had enough. 

“We’re not going to the police,” he said. “And I didn’t fucking blackmail him into coming, he made the decision himself. I don’t know what your problem is but you seem to have had one since we got together.”

“I don’t have a problem with you, Isaac,” Stiles replied. “I have a problem with your attitude.”

“And what attitude would that be? Trying to do the right thing?”

“No. You think the world owes you a favour because you’ve gone through some stuff. I’ve been through shit, so have Scott, Lydia, Malia, Kira, fucking everyone. So why do you need to bring it upon yourself to try and get sympathy for everything?”

Everybody in the room bar Stiles, Isaac and Hope shifted uncomfortably. Isaac felt a stab of rage.

“I don’t try and get sympathy for everything. I just try not to skirt around issues that affect me when other people are at risk,” he said. “If you really have that much of a problem   
with my attitude, don’t fucking worry. I’ll be gone in a few hours.”

“Scott,” Stiles said. “You need to really think about this.”

“I have,” Scott said. He looked like he was on the verge of tears seeing his fiancé and his life-long best friend arguing in such a personal way that he got the feeling the damage done would never be repaired. “I’ve thought about it a lot. Stiles, I think you should leave.”

Stiles bit his lip and Isaac had to fight back a savage surge of pleasure. He liked Stiles, he really did, but since he and Scott had first gotten together, he’d noticed that his friend had begun to get much more distant, and much more sarcastic. 

He’d also worried that it would come down to an ultimatum where Scott would end up picking Stiles over him. Finally it had done, and Isaac’s insecurities were put to rest. Isaac could see that Scott wasn’t happy, so he stepped in.

“Listen, maybe you guys should all head home,” he said. “Scott and I have a few things to do before… you know.”

Lydia and Kira nodded and followed when Stiles left the room without a word. Malia hung behind.

“Hey,” Isaac said.

“Hey,” she replied. “I think it’s a good thing that you’re doing. Even if it’s not the best idea, even if it might go wrong, that girl’ll grow up knowing that there’s someone in the world willing to fight for her. And that makes all the difference.” 

She pulled Isaac into a hug. When they broke apart, she did the same to Scott. 

“Take care of her,” she said to Isaac over Scott’s shoulder. “And each other.”

And with that, she left, with a quick wave to Hope. Then it was just the three of them.

“Okay,” Scott said. “So this is actually real. We’re actually doing this.”

“Yep,” Isaac said. “You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, you know. I’d understand, Scott.”

“You gave me a choice and I made it, I,” he replied. “We’re gonna be the Bonnie and Clyde of kidnapping abuse victims, that’s decided. What we need to do now is get ready. Where are we going to take her?”

Isaac sighed. He’d been trying to think of a place where they could go, but to no avail. All family on both sides was a no-go. Scott’s mom’s lakeside cabin upstate was out of bounds as it would be the first place that the police would look. Even Vancouver was out of the question as they didn’t have access to Hope’s passport. He shrugged at Scott hopelessly.

“I haven’t got a fucking clue,” he said. 

Scott smiled.

“I do,” he said.

-

Getting Hope into the car wasn’t nearly as big of a problem as Isaac had anticipated.

“We’re going on a surprise vacation!” Scott had said to her and it was as simple as that. She had asked if her dad was coming along but Isaac told her firmly that he wasn’t. Instead of being upset or confused by this, she seemed to be thrilled. 

“Brother holiday, brother holiday!” she had shouted as Isaac washed and changed her. As they left the house, Isaac almost had a heart attack when he saw a car that looked like Melissa’s, but when it passed under a streetlight, he saw that the license plate didn’t match. He breathed a sigh of relief as he strapped Hope in. 

Scott got into the driver’s seat and Isaac took shotgun. Hope didn’t need anybody to sit in the back with her as she had some handheld game that she’d found in Scott’s bedroom that was keeping her entertained. 

“So,” Isaac said. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” 

“Not just yet,” Scott replied. “I want to think it through first. Let’s get to the highway and then we’ll make the decision.”

Isaac frowned but didn’t say anything. He looked out of his window at the town they were leaving behind. He’d never had much of an attachment to Beacon Hills, but he knew that Scott did. Between the two of them, they’d lived in the town for well over forty years but there was a massive difference in how they viewed the place.

For Scott, Isaac knew, it was a place where he’d lived and loved and laughed. The place where he’d grown up and made friends. But for Isaac it was the place where his mother had died, the place where he’d last seen his brother, the place where he’d been abused. There were happy memories mixed in there too, of course, but his recollection was overwhelmingly negative. Although Isaac knew they’d be back when this all cleared away, somehow he knew he wouldn’t have too much of a problem if they never returned.

-

Typically, traffic is never that bad on an average Thursday night after 10pm. But the roads seemed to be even emptier than they had anticipated. That only worked to their advantage. It gave them shorter journey times. Isaac knew that a police chase wouldn’t be on the cards; Joseph and Melissa wouldn’t know they’d gone until the morning, and they’d have no way of knowing where the boys had taken Hope, but the thought entered his mind a few times that if it did come to that, they’d have a good chance on these roads. 

An hour into their journey, Hope was fast asleep and Scott had turned the radio on. He’d told Isaac that he could go to sleep if he wanted but Isaac felt like keeping him company. The two of them hadn’t really talked much but as they were coming up to the interstate, Scott broke the silence.

“This is mental,” he said. “Absolutely mental.”

“I didn’t force you to come, you know,” Isaac replied, feeling a little ashamed. He knew that Scott wouldn’t even be involving himself in this whole ordeal if it wasn’t for him, but then it wasn’t like Isaac had made him become an accessory to kidnap. Fuck, when he put it like that, it sounded much worse.

“I know,” Scott said. “I chose to come. I don’t regret that. Doesn’t mean I can’t think that we’re both mental.”

Isaac nodded, conceding that his fiancé had a good point. He looked over his shoulder at Hope sleeping in the car seat directly behind Scott. She looked so peaceful; you couldn’t tell from looking at her what she’d been through in her short life. 

“Are we doing the right thing?” Isaac asked. Through all his faux conviction and his determination to do good for Hope, he still didn’t know if he truly was. 

Scott took his right hand off the gearstick and rested it on Isaac’s left. 

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we’re not doing the right-est thing, but we’re not doing the wrong one.”

“’Right-est’ isn’t a word,” Isaac said, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. 

“Oh no, I used a fake word,” Scott laughed. “I hope they don’t send me to jail.”

Although Isaac laughed, he found himself wondering if there was any subtext to what his fiancé had said. ‘I hope they don’t send me to jail.’ Well, wasn’t that a realistic risk of this? He and Scott were risking prison to help Hope and chances are, they’d fail. 

“Realistically, how many people do you think get away with kidnap?” Scott asked, mirroring Isaac’s thoughts.

“Probably not many,” Isaac replied honestly. “Though, to be fair, most people kidnap children for very different reasons from the ones that we have.”

Scott nodded. 

“This is the worst plan in the history of bad plans,” he said.

“Seeing as I don’t even know the plan,” Isaac said. “I can’t really agree with you. Where are we going?”

Scott shifted in his seat and looked over at Isaac.

“Okay, but before I tell you just remember we’ve already kidnapped a kid so a few more laws broken probably won’t make too much difference.”

Isaac kept his mouth shut. He didn’t particularly like the sound of where this was going. He nodded a little as if to say ‘go on’.

“How do you feel about illegally crossing the Mexican border?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as you've probably guessed, I'm not a massive fan of Stiles. Also, I've received a few comments/messages in the past 10 days regarding Derek's appearance, I just want to answer this now for everyone to see: Derek will return, but only once and not in the most significant of ways. There will also be a few cameos from other characters such as Danny. These will be nothing more than cameos. The only characters that recur are those in the character tags.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the long, unscheduled hiatus. I truly am. If you wish to know my reasons, then visit my blog post here: http://westerosipriest.tumblr.com/post/124619242382/more-ive-had-a-tough-time-over-the-past-year for information. If not, please enjoy!

“Are you fucking serious?” Isaac asked. Scott looked over at him from the driver’s seat.

“I know it sounds kinda extreme,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we’ve already kidnapped a little girl. Regardless of our reasons, that’s still a felony. We might as well do our best to not get caught.”

“But Scott,” Isaac sighed. “you know we’re going to get caught one day. The whole idea is that we’re going to get caught. I don’t want to keep her until she’s twenty one and then be like ‘oh yeah, you’re on your own now, see you when I get out of prison’, I want to keep her away from _him_ until we can get enough proof to stop him from taking her back.”

“But if we go across the border, they’ll need to extradite us in order to convict us. So when we come back across of our own accord, they might be a bit like ‘oh well clearly they know they did wrong and they’re cooperating’. It could work for us.”

Isaac considered the proposal. He supposed, in theory, it did sound like a decent enough plan. Go to Mexico, wait to be found, come back before they’re apprehended and show that they’re willing to cooperate with the police.

“Okay,” Isaac said, “Let’s consider this for a second. So first of all, how the fuck do we get to Mexico?”

Scott smiled to himself, but not so subtly that Isaac didn’t notice it.

“It’s easy,” he said. “My uncle lives in San Diego and owns a boat. We can take that, go around border control and port about thirty miles into Mexico-“

“You say that as if border control is easy to get around.”

“It is though,” Scott said. Isaac looked at him incredulously; of all the problems in America and all the social institutions that were neglected, border control was probably the sole public service that received more funding than necessary.

“No, seriously,” Scott said, “Hear me out. Border control is insane on the Mexico-America side. There are a lot of illegals who smuggle themselves into this country. But how many people do you think go the other way? It’s literally just illegals going back to Mexico, so that’s problem solved, and criminals leaving America and becoming another country’s problem. It’s cheaper and easier for everyone to just ignore people going south.”

Isaac had never thought about it that way, but now that he did it made sense to him.

“Okay,” Isaac said. Scott looked at him in slight surprise.

“Really?”

“I’m not promising that I’m going to agree to this,” Isaac said. “But there’s no harm in going down to San Diego and seeing how realistic this is.”

Scott smiled and reached over to grip Isaac’s hand.

“Besides,” Scott said, “If it doesn’t work, we can fly from San Diego to Detroit and stay with an old friend of mine for a while. He owes me a big favour.”

“What would we use for ID for Hope?” Isaac asked.

“Hopefully we won’t need to, because there’s a chance we’ll be pulled up on that if a state-wide alert is announced, but I have access to her medical records,” Scott replied.

“Will that work?” Isaac asked.

“Yes,” said Scott with complete conviction. “It’s not an accepted form of ID but it’s the policy of all American airlines to allow anybody under the age of sixteen to fly if they have a life-threatening illness and their travel is for medical reasons.”

“Hope isn’t sick though,” Isaac countered. “And she’s not flying for medical reasons.”

“That’s true,” Scott agreed. “Luckily, I not only know how to access Hope’s medical records, but I know how to modify them. I also know the abbreviations and codes that a medical professional would use in her case.”

“How much time do you want to spend in prison, Scott?” Isaac asked, finding it laughable that overnight they’d gone from your average nine-to-five-ers to multiple offenders. “Kidnap, fraud, breaching medical confidentiality. Are there any more?”

“Not for me,” Scott said looking away from the road and at Isaac _with a fucking smile on his face._ “But I’m sure you’ll be tried for theft, and breaking and entering.”

“Breaking and entering _your mom,”_ Isaac said, putting on his best Stiles voice.

“Please don’t talk about entering my mother,” Scott said, grimacing. “Especially when you’re imitating Stiles.”

“Shit, didn’t think of it like that,” Isaac laughed. “He was hardly acting like a best friend earlier though,” he added, his tone turning more serious.

“He was doing what he thought was right,” Scott said, a little sadly. “That’s what best friends do.”

“I’m sorry,” Isaac said. “The two of you will get through this, you know you will.”

Scott nodded but didn’t reply. Isaac looked at him, really looked at him. Scott’s hair was a little greasy and small purple blemishes had collected beneath his eyes. While he still had the remnants of a smile on his face, something sad still lingered around him. Shoulders hunched over slightly with his white-knuckled fingers clutching the steering wheel, he looked almost ghostly. His skin, while distinctly of Latino colouring, looked pale, and his eyes while focused were slightly misty.

Isaac’s eyes focused on Scott’s face, “I love you.”

Scott’s appearance didn’t change, but Isaac felt a slight shift in the atmosphere.

“I love you too,” Scott said. “Where did that come from?”

“From my heart,” Isaac said in a goofy voice.

Scott laughed.

“Sometimes, I feel like I don’t tell you how much you mean to me often enough,” Isaac said, and when Scott moved to interrupt him, his pressed on quickly. “You gave me a reason to keep going when I didn’t have many. And I’ll always be grateful to you for that. I don’t want to be dramatic, but realistically you’re probably the reason I’m alive.”

“You make it sound like you’re only with me out of gratitude,” Scott said with a wry smile.

“Oh, trust me, I am,” Isaac said. “Gratitude and your hot Latino body. Your abs complete me, Scott.”

Scott blushed as he laughed. Isaac had never admitted it, but _fuck that turned him on._

“I’m serious,” he continued. “Your glistening, sweaty torso feels like Christmas to me. If you were a Roman general, I would fight the entire country for the privilege to lick you clean after battle. You don’t get to see the way your ass moves, but Mother of God it is a sight to behold, and don’t get me started on how it feels.”

Isaac could feel himself getting hard, and he could see that Scott was too. While he felt a little weird at the fact that he was essentially talking dirty to his fiancé with his kid sister only a metre away, he found the sight of Scott visibly struggling with his sudden increase in temperature way too hot to leave alone.

“I could sleep on your ass, Scott. It’s like a pillow. And fuck me, it tastes so good. If I had to choose between breathing and tasting you, I would spend my last moments eating your ass. Or maybe, I’d turn you around and work on the front.”

Scott’s breath hitched. He was clutching the steering wheel, his eyes locked dead ahead, jaw clenched in concentration.

“Yeah, I know you’d like that more. I’ve spent so much time on your cock, I know exactly what to do to make you crumble. With just my tongue, I could reduce you to a _fucking_ mess, Scott,” Isaac’s voice dropped, quiet and low, “We both know that it’s true.”

He reached over and placed his hand on Scott’s noticeable – very, very noticeable – erection. It was rock solid but it still twitched at his touch. With two fingers, he popped open the top button of Scott’s jeans.

“In fact, Scott, I think I’m going to remind you how much control I have over how you feel. Right now, I am going to take off my seatbelt, lean over and absolutely _drain_ whatever you have stored in there. You are going to drive on, towards San Diego, and you’re going to do it well. Because if you don’t and we crash, every major news station in this country is going to broadcast how I died with your cock in my mouth.”

Scott’s breathing sped up. Isaac could see that his fiancé was breathless, and anxious – and unbearably aroused. As Isaac watched, he took his hands from the wheel, tore open the remaining buttons on his jeans, hitched up a little and swiftly brought the waistline of his jeans and boxers to rest at the tops of his knees. He glanced over at Isaac, silently begging him – and Isaac obliged.

Scott and Isaac’s relationship thrived on versatility. The two of them had explored every area of their sexuality that either of them could think of. While there was a definite lean towards Scott topping, neither of them enjoyed anything more than pure, raw, spur-of-the-moment passion. And a blowjob on the highway filled this criteria.

The vast difference between the two in their sex life was that Scott was very all-in and put 100% effort into everything. But he didn’t really retain much information to use again. Isaac, on the other hand, rarely matched Scott’s effort levels. Particularly, in the case of blowjobs. But this was because he retained information, stored little flesh memories and used them later. If he put 100% effort into sucking Scott’s cock, Scott would not last long. This was one of the times that Isaac put 100% in. He didn’t want to distract Scott from the road for long, and he did want to show Scott how easily he could pull him apart at the seams.

Scott lasted less than a minute, and the orgasm was intense to say the least. As he climaxed, he curled his fist into Isaac’s hair and pulled him half off of his cock. Recognizing this signal, Isaac angled his head so that the imminent stream of come would hit his tongue, and not the back of his throat, which he know would cause him to cough and possibly choke in a very unsexy manner.

As the final few drops hit Isaac’s tongue, he pulled up a little so that he only had the head of Scott’s cock in his mouth and he sucked as hard as he could. Scott bucked into his face, shoving his entire cock back into Isaac, connecting with the back of his throat in the process. When his cock connected with the back of his fiancé’s throat, Scott jumped and unintentionally put his entire weight on the accelerator. Their speed jumped and the car jolted, throwing Isaac backwards. His cheek connected with Scott’s abdominal muscles. Taking it in his stride, Isaac pulled off the cock, turned and licked a stripe across Scott’s stomach, leaving a trail of semen dripping down his six-pack. He swallowed the rest as he sat back up grinning.

“Fuck,” Scott groaned. His voice cracked and he shuddered a little, clearly having some sort of orgasm after-shock. “Fuck; that was – _fuck_.”

“Intense?” Scott nodded. “Yeah I could tell, Captain Come Quick.”

Scott grinned. Neither of them were porn stars, nor were they particularly fussed about not being porn stars. It was rare for either of them to last very long during a blowjob, but the last time Scott had gone down on Isaac, he had lasted nearly forty minutes. So he was going to take this opportunity to rib his fiancé.

“I’ve known bullets to leave guns slower.”

“Fuck off,” Scott said, his still wide grin betraying the faux angry voice. “If I had that level of cock sucking talent, you’d be asleep by now. Jesus, you last half an hour one time and think you’re Ron fucking Jeremy.”

“Well, I might be the better cock-sucker,” Isaac said. “Sorry, I mean, I am the undisputed better cock-sucker, as shown here by the One-Pump Wonder.”

“You’ve wounded my honour, Isaac,” Scott said. “I may not be able to resist when you’re actively trying to make me come quickly, but when I’m next behind you, drilling you into a mattress, we’ll see how long you can last, huh?”

Isaac blushed.

“Point taken.”

They settled into a light hearted back-and-forth, teasing each other, quietly laughing so as to not wake Hope, stealing glances and touches and kisses as they moved further and further away from Joseph Lahey.

And for the first time since he’d met his little sister, Isaac felt hopeful. He felt hopeful that this would bring him closure, would allow him to finally move on. He felt hopeful that his father would slip up somewhere between discovering his daughter was missing and finding her. He felt hopeful that by the time Isaac took his sister home, she would have a real, loving home to go to. And most of all, he felt hopeful for Hope.

-

_The sky was grey but it didn’t look like it was going to rain. Isaac slumped down on one of the benches outside the school. Thursdays were his favourite day; he had a free period last thing, his father worked late and he spent a few hours after school with Erica and Boyd. As his two friends had biology last, Isaac was alone – but he liked the fifty minutes he had to himself._

_Isaac looked around at his the kids who shared his school. He knew some of their faces as well as he knew his own. His own slightly bruised face. And yet none of his schoolmates seemed to ever_ see _him. Or if they did, they didn’t look for long. He was a plain teenage boy with nothing about him that stood out. Self-confidence was a foreign concept to him, so people paid him no attention._

_Most of the time, Isaac didn’t mind. He relished the time that he had alone with his thoughts; it gave him time to fantasize about the liberation he’d one day take for himself. Seconds quickly became hours when he found the time to retreat into his own fantasies._

_This particular Thursday was different though. Isaac had been in a bad mood all day. He’d just found out that a particularly painful trip to his father’s basement had left him with a hamstring injury that would rule him out of the first and second lacrosse games of the season – and he’d just made first string. Erica and Boyd had finally – **finally**_ _–_ _gotten together and he was feeling a little left out. In his last lesson, he found out he’d gotten a C- on his French test, despite being never having dropped below a B. To add to it all, the following day would mark the anniversary of his mother’s death. So all in all, it hadn’t been a good week._

_Isaac lay down on the bench and closed his eyes. Not for the first time in his short life, he found himself contemplating how unfair the world was. Why did his mother have to die? And Camden too? Isaac genuinely believed he could cope if the two of them were still with him. Maybe, he’d be better off dead too._

_“Hey,” a voice said from above him. “Are you okay, man?”_

_Isaac opened his eyes. Scott McCall was looking back at him, a concerned expression on his face._

_“Um,” Isaac said. He couldn’t remember a single time that somebody had approached him in school without any invitation. He was walking on new ground here._

_“Mind if I join you?” Scott asked, taking the pressure away from Isaac. “I’m waiting on a friend and I have like an hour ‘til he comes out.”_

_Isaac sat up and smiled at Scott. Well,_ tried _to smile at Scott, He didn’t know quite what he looked like, but it didn’t feel like a normal looking smile._

_“I’m Scott,” said Scott._

_“I know,” Isaac replied. “You’re lacrosse captain. I’m Isaac.”_

_“I know. You’re on the team too. You made first string, right?”_

_“Yeah, but I’m injured so I’m not going to be playing the first two games of the season.”_

_“I remember Finstock saying. Hamstring, right?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“How did you do it, do you mind me asking?”_

_“Um-,” Isaac faltered._

_“Nerves kick in when you got first line?” Scott asked. “There’s no shame in admitting you tried to train too hard; I ended up in hospital a week after being made co-captain.”_

_Isaac smiled, relieved. Scott hadn’t even waited for validation, but clearly he could sense the tension surrounding his question._

_“Everything alright?” Scott asked. At the sight of Isaac’s reaction, his concerned look intensified. “Captain’s duty, gotta look after the team. If it’s personal though, I get it, but you can talk to me in confidence any time.”_

_Isaac looked at Scott’s earnest expression and resolved to never get angry at his attempts to help. But he didn’t feel comfortable talking to a relative stranger about his problems, even if said stranger had the most angelic face he’d ever seen, and a body that a Hollywood actor wouldn’t be ashamed of..._

_“Do you want a pass around?” Scott asked, motioning to the lacrosse sticks poking out of his shoulder bag._

_Isaac nodded. It was a strange feeling having a relative stranger being kind, even welcoming, towards him. But while it was not a feeling he was particularly familiar with, it was not one which he was adverse to._

_The two passed a ball between them having moved away from anything remotely fragile. As they played, they moved further and further apart, and yet became closer and closer. Isaac didn’t have enough experience in the department of friends to make a clear judgment, but he was pretty sure that that was exactly what he and Scott were becoming._

_“A lot of it comes down to confidence, you know?” Scott was saying as the ball swept from net to net. “If you believe you’re a good player, you are. And if you believe you can get better, you will. I know ‘practice makes perfect’ is a bit cliché, but it’s true.”_

_Isaac smiled. Scott seemed like some sort of extra-terrestrial creature to him. No, that’s not right, he seemed like some sort of divine being. The kindness, and the smiling and the, Jesus Christ,_ the body. _Even Isaac could recognise that Scott was something special._

_The game lasted a little under an hour before Erica and Boyd made their way over to him. Isaac and Scott were standing about fifty metres apart by this point, still making 95% of their passes accurate._

_“-just annoys me, like, Harris is a chemistry teacher,” Isaac heard Erica complain as she made her way into earshot. “I already have to suffer him for four goddamn hours a week, why the fuck do they think it’s okay to let him sub in biology? Is there literally no one else? Hey, Isaac!”_

_Isaac caught the ball for a final time and pulled it out of the net with his hand. He turned to face his friends with a smile on his face._

_“What’s got you so chirpy?” Erica asked as if she’d never in the history of the universe seen him smile before._

_“Is it a crime to be happy?” Isaac retorted without venom._

_Erica’s eyes fell over Isaac’s shoulder and as she looked back at him, a smirk of her own developed._

_“Ah, I get it,” she said, raising her voice. “Lacrosse with the hot Latino would have me smiling like the Cheshire cat too.”_

_“Shut up.”_

_“No, keep talking,” Scott said, drawing level with Isaac. “I could get used to being the hot Latino.”_

_Isaac blushed – why his stupid fucking face couldn’t just chill out around normal people he never knew – and Scott noticed._

_“Don’t worry man,” he said. “No shame in being attracted to the hot Latino. If I wasn’t the hot Latino, I would be attracted to the hot Latino.”_

_“The average Latino, you mean,” Erica said._

_Isaac glared at her, silently reprimanding her for insulting his new friend. Again, Scott noticed the look on his face and burst out laughing. Erica and Boyd joined in._

_“What’s so funny?” Isaac asked, confused._

_“Just you,” Erica laughed. “You’re so fucking earnestly defensive. It’s cute.”_

_“Yeah, it is,” Scott agreed, and Isaac’s stomach literally dropped to the floor._

_“Whoa man, I said you’re cute, I didn’t propose,” Scott said, once again noticing his expression (later that night while he lay in bed, Isaac reasoned that Scott must have been looking at him constantly to catch all the looks on his face, but at the time the thought didn’t occur to him)._

_“Sorry bro,” Boyd said, addressing Scott. “I don’t think Isaac’s into hot Latinos.”_

_“Yes, I am,” Isaac replied, much too quickly to pass it off as nonchalant. Erica and Boyd both laughed, but Scott just smiled and tilted his head._

_“I’m gonna have to go, Isaac,” he said. “I need to meet Stiles, but if you give me your phone for a sec’ I’ll key in my number.”_

_Isaac silently handed his phone over and said two silent prayers to the God he hadn’t believed in since his mom died: **please don’t let me scare him away** and **please let him be at least bi.**_

_Once Scott had typed the number in, he moved next to Isaac and held the phone aloft._

_“Wha-“_

_“Smile,” Scott said, already grinning. Isaac did so, awkwardly but honestly, as his new friend took the picture._

_“I’ll text you tonight,” Isaac said once Scott had handed the phone back. Scott pulled him into a half-awkward-half-pleasant hug._

_“Why wait?” He asked. He pulled away and walked off towards a boy who Isaac recognised as Stiles._

_“Well I think we know what dear old Ise’s gonna be wanking to for the next year,” Erica said to Boyd._

_But Isaac didn’t care. Erica could tease him all she liked, it was only in jest. But Isaac knew that the picture next to ‘Scott J’ in his contacts wasn’t going to be some perverted wank go-to. It was going to be the first of many pictures of he and his new friend._

_The day was still overcast, and the sky was still grey, but to Isaac, it felt like the middle of summer._

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, a late chapter that was not my fault! I've had this chapter written for weeks, and it's taken my beta a while to get around to doing it. Same thing with the next chapter to come. Luckily, that means I've had and will continue to have the chance to write faster than I upload and I'm currently about four chapters ahead of the storyline. With any luck, I'll finish writing by the start of September and the uploads will come in regular intervals. 
> 
> Thanks for the support!

The sun rose in San Diego as Isaac turned off the car’s engine. Scott had stayed awake long enough to give him rough directions to the docks, and then proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. Though Isaac had only been driving for a little over two hours, and Scott had driven for almost seven, he was exhausted. He hadn’t slept at all whilst in the passenger seat, and that lost night was catching up with him. The day wasn’t particularly warm, but the driver side window was right down as the cold air was the only thing keeping Isaac alert. Isaac sighed as he realised he couldn’t raise the window without the engine on. He turned the ignition.

“-Za-,” Hope said.

“What’s that?” Isaac asked, holding the button in to close the window. He turned the ignition off once again and turned around to face his sister.

“Isaac,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Hiya. Where’re we?”

“San Diego.”

“Who’s Diego?”

“No, San Diego. It’s a city.”

“Oh.”

Isaac reached back and gripped her hand. She squeezed.

“We won’t be here for long, it’s just where we’re travelling from,” he said.

“Where are we going?” Hope asked.

“That depends,” he replied. “Either to Detroit, or Mexico.”

“Hola!” She shouted, pulling her hand away as she burst into a fit of giggles.

“Clever girl!” Isaac said. He realized he’d spoken a little too loudly when Scott growled at him.

“Fu’ing ‘ell, where’re’e?” he grunted.

“San Diego,” Isaac answered, biting his tongue so as not to scold his fiancé on his language, “Just arrived.”

Scott lifted his head and rubbed his eyes. He looked around for a few moments as if trying to get his bearings.

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know where my uncle’s boat is.”

Isaac just looked at him.

“We drove to San Diego and you don’t know where the boat is?” he asked incredulously. “I haven’t slept in twenty four hours and you don’t know where the boat is?”

“If you think that’s bad,” said Scott as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “I guess you won’t like that I don’t actually know what the boat looks like either.”

“Are you joking?”

“Nope,” Scott smiled.

Isaac felt a stab of anger.

“You brought me down to San Di-fucking-ego to tell me you don’t know what the boat looks like?”

Whoa,” Scott said, his smile being replaced by a frown. “Calm down. I don’t know where the boat is, but I know the key code to my uncle’s building and it’ll say in there.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Isaac asked. “Just breaking into a random building?”

“Technically, yes,” Scott replied placatingly. “But this isn’t a random building, it’s my dad’s family’s building. And my uncle named me a legal shareholder of the property. So, it’s partly my building.”

“You never told me that before.”

“We never needed to access it before. Besides, I’m a shareholder, not co-owner. It’s not really worth mentioning if your share in the property is about the equivalent of a desk.”

Isaac grudgingly smiled. He was tired and annoyed – and moderately horny because why the fuck was Scott allowed to talk in his sleep during a sex dream? – but he still found Scott funny.

“But we still need to decide where we’re going to take her,” Scott said, his voice low, so Hope couldn’t hear him. She’d spotted Scott’s old Nintendo DS and it was more than keeping her occupied, but Scott obviously didn’t want to take the risk of her listening.

“I thought we were going to Mexico,” Isaac said.

“We can get there, but where would we go?” Scott said back. “I’ve got family in places, but none of them are safe for her. My family comes from poor places and I haven’t seen most of them since I was her age. They’d be on the phone to border control in a heartbeat if they thought it would score them a couple of hundred dollars.”

Isaac’s heart sank. He hadn’t thought about where they’d go. He hadn’t really thought about anything. Mexico had not been thought through at all, it was impulsive.

Shit, he thought.

“You said something about Detroit?” Scott muttered.

“Yeah, I have an old friend that owes me a favour – a big one – but we’re at the docks now and we can’t do both.”

“No,” Scott said. “And that’s exactly what the police will think if they find my car here. They’ll think we either got the boat down to Mexico, or that we ditched the car to throw them off as we travelled somewhere else. But what if we just stay in San Diego?”

“Is that a good idea? I mean we both know how much publicity a child abduction case is going to get. What if we get recognized?”

“You wanna know what’s great about being an ethnic minority? Most racists think we all look the same. And the police are mostly racists. Going unnoticed isn’t a problem for me, it’s her that’ll get recognized. We keep her out of sight. And I happen to know somewhere we can stay for a good few weeks without her getting bored.”

“Where?” Isaac asked.

“My uncle isn’t here. He lives in New York most of the time, but he owns his house outright. Doesn’t rent it out or anything. Just a nice, empty house, with a private garden and a swimming pool. The one person in my family who owns his house outright, and he doesn’t even live in it. Plus, I know where he keeps a spare key.”

Isaac smiled.

“So we’re going to squat in your uncle’s house?” he asked. It didn’t seem that bad of a plan.

Scott nodded.

“It’s only about a thirty minute walk from here. We can make it there before anybody starts looking for us.”

“Okay,” Isaac said. “Let’s go.”

-

The house itself was beautiful. While it didn’t look particularly large, Isaac knew from what Scott had told him that the inside was enormous. The outside was even bigger. It was two stories high and about thirty metres wide, with a small veranda running along the top floor.

Inside, the walls and furnishing were both modern and stylish, with a sleek, black, U-shaped leather sofa dominating the lounge. The television on the wall in front of it was about 50 inches wide and as thin as laptop.

The kitchen was rather small but everything that could possibly be needed was in there. A door by the fridge opened out into a large dining room with a twelve seater table. Scott told Isaac that that was where he’d been told that his parents were getting a divorce. The room didn’t seem as welcoming after that.

Upstairs, the house was completely different. It changed from the modern and sophisticated plainness of the downstairs into a warm, welcoming, idiosyncratic home upstairs. On the walls were numerous red hand prints. The names ‘Scott’, ‘Hernando’, ‘Raphael’, ‘Melissa’, and even ‘Stiles’ accompanied many of the handprints with a date scribbled underneath in red marker. Isaac smiled as he saw them.

“A bit sentimental, your uncle?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Scott laughed. “He never had kids of his own, but he’s always been a family man. Even after dad left, he always kept up with mom and me.”

The bedroom that was to be Hope’s was small and cosy. A bunk-bed stood tall against the wall and at the end of it, there was a toy box filled to the brim with Legos, cars and various action figures. She took to it immediately, and while Scott and Isaac continued the tour, she stayed to build a Lego castle.

Scott and Isaac took the other spare bedroom. Hernando’s was nicer, but Scott didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of entering his uncle’s property without permission, and then rubbing salt in the wounds by sleeping in his bed. Their chosen room was painted a light magnolia with a solitary coffee brown wall behind the headboard of the bed.

The bed itself was huge; easily large enough to contain five people side by side. It was made of an elegant mahogany and the bedsheets followed the same colour pattern as the walls, with a coffee brown duvet cover and pillowcases contrasting against the magnolia bedsheet and fur throw. It looked like something out of a lake cabin in some Hollywood rom-com; it suited Isaac just fine.

He kicked off his shoes and fell backwards onto the bed. The fur was synthetic but was as soft as a kitten. Scott moved next to him.

“So this is home,” Scott said. “At least until we’re arrested or forced to leave.”

“Well, technically, that’s what home is,” Isaac said sardonically. “It’s a nice place.”

“Yeah, it is.” Scott sighed. “It’s weird though.  My parents used to stay in this bed. Like, I am lying with my fiancé in my divorced parents’ former bed.”

Isaac swung a leg over Scott and pushed himself up so that he was straddling his fiancé.

“I don’t know if it’s bad luck to have sex in the bed of divorcees,” Isaac said. “But I think I’d like to take the risk.”

Scott laughed and pushed him off, swinging his own body upwards so that he was in an identical position to the one that Isaac had just been in.

“But Isaac,” he said, putting on a voice that would’ve befit a 1950s priest. “Think of the child.”

“Fuck the child,” Isaac said. Scott raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think that through, shit. You know what I mean. She’s content playing in her room. And if you’re that concerned, we’ll go under the covers so if she walks in, she won’t see anything.”

Scott bent forwards and put his lips to Isaac’s neck. He bit down – not lightly – and suckled Isaac’s skin between his teeth. Isaac keened and bucked into him.

“Someone’s eager,” Scott said mockingly.

“I’ve been awake for over 24 hours and you were talking in your sleep – during a sex dream. Care to share?”

Scott started to rock his hips forwards and backwards over Isaac’s crotch. The friction created was enough to spark his semi into a rock hard erection.

“You want me to tell you, do you?” Scott asked. Isaac nodded, suddenly short of breath. “Or do you want me to show you?”

In a quick motion, Scott pinned Isaac’s wrists together above his head and moved his spare hand to his jeans.

“I dreamt that we’d just gotten married…” – the top two buttons on Scott’s fly popped open as he fiddled with them – “… we decided to go out onto the balcony of the hotel we were honeymooning at…” – another button popped open – “… and you said you were thirsty but the bar was closed…” – he unfastened the last button – “… so I gave you something to keep you occupied.”

Isaac swallowed and took a long, shaky breath. Scott had pushed his jeans down to his knees, but Isaac’s body stopped them moving any further.

“I’m going to stand up and take off my jeans, Isaac,” Scott said. He was suddenly very assertive. “I’m then going to take off my socks and my shirt, leaving only my underwear. You will then get on your knees in front of me, and you will remove them with your teeth. Do you consent?”

Isaac nodded. Scott did exactly what he’d said he would; first the jeans, then the socks and finally the shirt. When he was down to just his underwear, Isaac slid down onto his knees on the floor. His face was just about level with Scott’s cock.

“And now,” Scott said, a playful smile teasing the corners of his lips, “with your teeth, if you please.”

Isaac did please. He pleased very much. He moved forwards and put a hand on each of his fiancé’s thighs. He gripped the waistband of Scott’s boxer shorts in his teeth and pulled downwards. He knew from experience that this only worked if he worked at the sides. But he could tell that Scott was loving the sight of him, so he alternated from left to right, pulling the waistband down only an inch or two at a time.

After about thirty seconds of teasing, the waistband reached the point just below the knees where there was nothing left holding them up. As they hit the floor, Scott stepped out of them and put a hand on Isaac’s head, guiding him towards his groin. Isaac put out his tongue to meet Scott’s cock.

“No,” Scott said. “Keep your tongue in your mouth. I’m going to put your head where I want it, and you’re going to do nothing but breathe in through your nose; I want you to smell me. Is that okay?”

Isaac nodded.

He did as he was told, despite the almost overwhelming urge to lick that came when the silky soft skin of Scott’s cock touched his nose.

Isaac took a deep breath in through his nose. His fiancé smelled of sweat and soap.

“Good,” Scott said. “That’s exactly what I want. Thank you. Is this good, yeah?”

“Yes,” Isaac said. His voice was broken from how intense his lust was.

“You are going to stand up and undress. Then, you will get onto the bed facing the headboard on your hands and knees. You will be under the covers. When you’re ready, I am going to make love to you. Good for you?”

“Yes,” Isaac said again. Scott had a thing for constantly reassuring himself that Isaac was consenting to everything. While he couldn’t think of a single time that he’d ever said ‘no’, the whole process just made him love his future husband even more.

He did exactly what he was told, though he took his time undressing; he did his absolute best to look as sexy as possible as he did so.

“You look beautiful, Ise,” Scott said tenderly when he was in place. “You always look so beautiful.”

Isaac smiled to himself. He didn’t really understand how the man who he’d been with for three years could still give him butterflies.

“So do you, Scott,” he said. “Now, um, if you’d like to, I would really appreciate it if you would come over here and take care of us both.”

“Don’t worry,” Scott said, once again assertive. “I assure you that I am going to pound you to the point that you’ll be whimpering my name and this mattress will be left with a permanent imprint of your hard cock.”

They didn’t have any lubricant to hand, so Scott had to make do with the Vaseline that he kept in his pocket. Isaac flinched when it made contact with his skin as it was colder than he’d remembered. He tried to stay still as Scott spread it across his hole and loosened him with a finger or two – or three – but he couldn’t ignore every impulse in his body screaming at him to push back into Scott’s touch.

Scott laughed and wiped his hand on a towel that he’d picked up from a rack on the wall.

“I’m gonna go in wrapped, okay?” he said. Isaac sighed but he understood. Anal sex wasn’t exactly the cleanest of activities and neither of them had had a proper wash – or toilet break – in a good twelve hours. Scott picked up the condom that he’d pulled from his wallet and tore the wrapper.

“Are you ready?” Isaac heard Scott ask.

He moaned his agreement; Isaac often found that the anticipation created by the build up to sex with Scott could be as satisfying as the actual act itself. He felt the head of Scott’s cock brush against his perineum and trail upwards until it paused against his anus. Isaac shivered.

“Yes,” Isaac said.

Scott didn’t need any more affirmation; he pushed in, slowly but firmly, and Isaac pushed backwards to meet him and allow him easier access.

“The chamber of secrets has been opened again,” Isaac said and Scott literally snorted. They both laughed as Scott pushed all the way in.

Scott wasn’t exactly big – he was actually fairly average in both length and girth. He was a little less than six inches long and slender enough for Isaac to touch his forefinger and thumb around its thickest part.

But his size was perfect for what Isaac wanted to feel. It stretched him just enough to feel a light burning sensation, but not so much that penetration actually hurt. Not to mention the fact that from the moment the two began foreplay until the moment that the last person had climaxed, their mutual pleasure was Scott’s only priority.

While it was true that Scott wasn’t very good at retaining exactly what made Isaac feel good, they did happen to be very in sync – Isaac had told Scott many times to just do what felt good for him and more often than not, it worked for both of them.

“Are you good?” Scott asked from above him.

“Yes,” he replied. He couldn’t help but find the constant need for reassurance incredibly arousing.

Scott started to thrust; he moved slowly at first with long, steady strokes, but as he moved into a rhythm, his pace quickened.

As Scott found this rhythm, he bent forwards so that his chest rubbed against his fiancé’s shoulder blades with each thrust. Isaac felt lips and tongue brush the side of his neck.

“Man,” Isaac breathed. “Fuck. Ahhh.”

The adjustment in Scott’s position had caused the direction of his thrusts just enough to angle against Isaac’s prostate. Every movement pushed him closer to climax and both of them knew it. He could hear Scott whispering into his skin, constantly giving and seeking reassurance.

“You good?”

Isaac moaned in affirmation and Scott’s thumb was suddenly on his tongue. He moaned into it and sucked and bit and licked. As quickly as it was there, it was gone.

“Wha-,” Isaac began to complain but the sensation from his midriff cut the words from his mouth. He gasped as he realised what was happening; Scott’s thumb had gone straight from his tongue to the head of his cock and small, wet circles were being rubbed into the most sensitive part of Isaac’s body. He felt like every single muscle in his body went into a spasm simultaneously.

For the first time in his life, Isaac felt his body go into an orgasm without ejaculating. The sheer intensity of the brief climax also reduced him to weeping. As he came out of it, Scott bit down on Isaac’s shoulder and pushed all the way inside him.

As he felt the weight distribution change, his arms started to give way and he knew he couldn’t hold himself up for much longer.

As if sensing Isaac’s thoughts, Scott leant back and pulled his fiancé up with him. They stayed on their knees, but at this point, they were straight-backed and upright, though lent slightly backwards.

Scott wrapped his right hand around Isaac’s cock and started pumping his fist in time with his hips. Between the feelings emanating from his prostate, the tightness of Scott’s hand around his shaft, the heat between the two of them and the whispered words of passion known only to each other, it wasn’t long before Isaac was on the verge of a second orgasm.

“Scott, fuck Scott!”

Isaac’s cock swelled and he jerked forward as Scott was moving backwards. He came in three long spurts, the first of which landed low on the headboard. Scott slipped out of him and Isaac felt a strange combination of elation and emptiness.

“Finish me with your mouth, yes?” Scott asked.

Isaac collapsed onto the pillows facing Scott who had pulled the condom off and dropped it onto the towel. He moved forwards on his knees and pressed the head of his cock against Isaac’s lips.

Isaac opened his mouth and licked the head. He heard Scott gasp and felt him shiver from a combination of pleasure and sudden loss of heat against him.

Gripping the shaft with his right hand and rubbing Scott’s perineum with his moistened left, Isaac flicked his tongue around his fiancé’s glans which evoked a series of short, breathy moans. Isaac knew that he was close.

He pulled his head back and moistened his right thumb and hit Scott with the same trick that had caused his first orgasm; the effect was almost instantaneous. He rubbed his thumb firmly against Scott’s frenulum and was rewarded by a spasm and a thick stream of semen coating pretty much everywhere above his lips.

“Fuck,” Scott breathed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come in your eye.”

“It’s alright,” Isaac said, trying to rub away the sting. “It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened. Let’s go and get cleaned up.”

Scott smiled. Isaac did too.

 


End file.
